


Fly with you (Upon a star)

by ecarian



Category: American Idol RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, M/M, Peter Pan - Freeform, TinkerBell - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-09
Updated: 2012-08-09
Packaged: 2017-11-11 18:13:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 41,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/481411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecarian/pseuds/ecarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kris is a tinker-talent fairy of Pixie Hollow; his job is to fix things. So when a violent storm heralds a new Arrival and the loss of fairy talents, it's up to Kris to find out what's happening. It's a race against time. Never Land is losing it's magic!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fly with you (Upon a star)

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to freakykat for the speedy beta. You are a treat, darling. And the biggest kudos to my wonderful artist va_bites, who made 12 (12!) pieces of beautiful art for me, better than I could ever have wished for. It's so creative and beautiful and such a brilliant representation and adaption of this story. You were endlessly helpful and willing to communicate and I am eternally grateful that you chose my story. You made this bigbang such a wonderful and positive experience, and I am so glad that I got to share it with you. It wouldn't have been the same without you.
> 
> [ Art Post!](http://va-bites.livejournal.com/5530.html) Post contains major plot spoilers!

[ ](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/va_bites/26230525/16197/16197_original.jpg)

\---

It was the tuning pins. 

It had to be the pins. He could fix the pins. If it wasn’t the pins then it was the strings, and if it was the strings, Kris wouldn’t be able to fix the King’s harp. The Never silver he’d need for new ones was rarer than a swimming fairy, and the smith-talents hated working fast almost as much as they hated cold forges. 

Or if he was unlucky the problem could also be some kind of hairline fracture in the neck or sound box, which would be awful. The Stink Sap he’d need to glue it together was tar-like and stupidly ostracizing. 

"It's not the pins," Tinker Bell decided a couple hours later, when Kris had gone to her, beaten down and helpless and ready to tear out his wings.

“It has to be the pins.” Could he make a new body? The tree-tending-talents were kind of ferocious about the amount of wood that could be taken from the Pixie Dust Tree, so he doubted it.

"Well, it’s not. The levers maybe?" Tink crossed her legs, fluttering her wings faster to keep balance on her stool. Tempting fate really; she wasn’t exactly the most graceful fairy. 

"No, I checked, they're fine." The levers weren’t loose, the strings weren't stretched out of shape, and he couldn't find any cracks in the wood. 

Kris tugged his hands through his hair.

Fairy Mary had a personal workshop at the back of Tinker's Nook tree. It overlooked the Autumn Forest and had been made by a terrible lightning strike turned cooperative vanity project. It let in light and had a big work table and it was quiet; there was space to spread his wings and plan and think. But it was fairly lonely without the clangs and bangs of the other tinkers, which Kris supposed was why Fairy Mary didn’t spend much time here.

  
[ ](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/va_bites/26230525/9855/original.jpg)   


"Are you sure it’s broken?” Tink said, scowling, breaking in to Kris’ contemplation and immediately demanding all his attention. “It doesn't look like it's broken."

"I know,” Kris worried his tongue between his teeth. “But it goes right out of tune as soon as someone starts playing it. And I don’t know what it could be."

"Instruments are temperamental. Have you tried talking to it? Maybe it doesn't feel appreciated."

"No, Allison said it was happy. Maybe a little confused over the fuss," He sighed, frustrated. He stroked a comforting hand down the sound box just in case, not too long now, don't worry; instruments didn't like being in pieces even more than they didn't like being out of tune. Made them cranky.

"What else could it be?" 

"Well..." Then Tink got that stubborn look on her face which incited in him a drastic self-preservation instinct, so Kris pleaded starvation, packed up the bits and pieces of his project and booked it to the Tearoom before she threw her lot in and got invested. 

\---

He was just sitting down to a snack of sweet rose tea and huckleberry shortcake when Katy flew in from the kitchen. She flounced down into the chair next to him, her apron covered in flour and her chef's hat tipped at a precarious angle over her bright flyaway hair. 

"Fly with you, Kris!" She snagged Kris' cup and spared a calculating glance at Kris' cake. He didn't snatch it out of her reach because she’d withhold her special blueberry and heart-flower nectar muffins from him if he did. Also it would be rude. "So I was wondering - -"

"You're cookie sheets are fine,” Kris said at once; this was a well trodden argument. “I have plans for that copper block and you're not getting it."

"- - if you'd like to try my new ginger and honeysuckle cream pudding," Katy finished, because she enjoyed dangling her baking-talent over his head if it could leverage new pots and pans out of him. "But if you're going to pull my wings off..." 

"You're awful," Kris laughed, giving in. "What do you want?"

Katy dropped something into his hand, looking chagrined. "My necklace broke. I know! I'd fly backward, but it got caught on the handle of my oven and snapped. Can you fix it?"

He spread the necklace out on the table. He’d made for her last autumn change of season, out of Lost Things he'd found washed up from the mainland. It had glass and copper beads and a metal feather pendant, and the link connected to the clasp was broken and twisted out of shape.

"Were you throwing pots with this thing?” he asked, couldn’t help it, because it took a lot of effort to warp this kind of metal. She socked him on the shoulder, wings snapping out as her glow burst burgundy with furious embarrassment. "Yeah, I can fix it. It might take me a while, though."

"That’s fine,” Katy said, settling down to sip at his tea. “Fixed the King’s harp yet?" 

"No," Kris said, feeling abruptly miserable, and then, because he wasn't above leveraging pity snacks from her either, added, "I'm a failure. I've lost the will to tinker. You should just put me out of my misery because I'll never fix anything again."

"I don’t believe you," Katy said, but slipped a cookie out of her pocket anyway, and they tasted best when they were pilfered. "What's the problem?"

"I don't know!" Kris threw his hands up in the air. "That's the thing, nothing's wrong, at least nothing I can find. It should work, and it's not. That's pretty much it."

"Do you think it'll be fixed by the festival?" 

"I hope so." Kris shrugged, feeling abruptly hunted, like there were a hundred eyes on him, judging his worth. 

"You'll figure it out," Katy said, giving him a quick hug and warm smile as sweet as her sugar cookies. "You're the best tinker I know." 

"Second best, maybe," Kris allowed. No one was as good as Tinker Bell, which was fine. He loved what he did – so much, too wrapped up in how things fit together, how they broke, to remember the necessities of his body, sometimes. He wouldn't want to do anything else, but he wouldn't want to be the best. Seemed too stressful. 

Katy shrugged, noncommittal. She had her loyalties and they wouldn’t be swayed. "Why isn't Tinker Bell working on it? If it's so important."

“I'm kind of the instrument specialist if you hadn't noticed,” he said, grinning when Katy snorted, and puffed up a bit with the reward of Katy’s smile, because honestly he didn’t know why the King had chosen Kris to fix his harp; he just hoped he hadn’t made a mistake. He shook his head and changed the subject. “Made anything new lately?”

Katy immediately launched into a fast paced play by play of a temperamental soufflé, gesturing with her arms for emphasis, like she was fighting a battle. From the information Kris knew about soufflés, which admittedly consisted of _delicious_ and _poofy_ , he guessed that was fairly accurate. She switched tracks and shared some of the gossip from the kitchens for a while after that, distracting him from his anxiety and telling him about her day before a shy kitchen-talent dragged her away, stammering irreparable disaster if she didn’t check her plum cream puff pastries _right this very instant._

"Good luck, Kris!" she yelled as she disappeared into the kitchen. 

Kris polished off the last of his shortcake – no reasonable fairy ever wasted huckleberry shortcake – drank the rest of his tea and let a serving-talent take his teacup and scallop shell plate. After that, Kris didn't really have an excuse to procrastinate and flew back to his workshop. 

He worked on the harp until well past dinner, putting it back together and taking it apart and tapping it with his hammer to and pretty much flying in place about the whole thing. When he was too frustrated to keep going, he put it aside and worked on a couple of dented pans and a delicate copper teapot that had been half crushed by an errant mouse wagon. He took a cursory glance at Katy’s necklace, but decided he was too irritated to give it the attention it deserved. By the time he was done, it was pitch black outside and the only fairies awake were the light-talents practicing their firework displays out over Sunflower Gully. 

Kris yawned and stretched, arms, legs and wings spread wide, and decided it was time for bed. 

His room in Home Tree was a haphazard extension of his talent; a pile of broken pots and pans stacked up in the corner for those rainy days when he couldn't fly to his workshop, a soap-dish Lost Thing for his bed. His spare magnifying glass – half of a pair which together made something Clumsies used to see with, strangely enough; they must be blind as bats – was on the wooden spool table in the middle of the room. 

He had a collection of keys (and one Clumsy spoon) tacked to the walls with rose thorns. Only a couple of them had matching locks, but his talent wasn’t key-lock-design and he mostly just liked looking at them, thinking about how all the pieces fit together. Katy said it was good to have hobbies.

He'd forgotten to close his window when he left that morning, so it was chilly when he got back. He closed the window and made himself a cup of tea, and then climbed into bed, wings tucked tight to his back as he huddled up in his blankets. He was out in a flash, and only had one dream where he couldn't fix the King’s harp and was banished from Never Land forever, so it wasn't too bad.

\---

It was sprinkling in the morning, a light drizzle pattering against the window and hinting at grey showers. He’d left his umbrella at his workshop, so he had to go groveling to Brad for a new one. 

Brad was a sewing-talent. He was loud and mean and hated everything Kris wore, but was also kind of funny, in a vicious sort of way. They weren't friends, except for how Brad always sat with him at lunch, ever-ready with a cutting observation which were horrendously rude, but made Kris laugh, muffled into his hands. Kris didn't think would ever stop being strange, but felt kind of inevitable, like a daily cup of pixie dust or the intense psychological trauma of flying under Fairy Gary and his kilt on a really windy day. 

He didn't like Brad's shop, though, which was a degree of chaos measured in delicate rolls of pearl-grey spider silk and dandelion satin, the discarded remains of unusable fabric cuts. With the Festival of Dazzling Colours rearing its rabid, competitive head, the sewing talents were busier than bees, stitching up a storm and being brilliant and looking martyred and harassed, and since Brad’s temper was larger and more volatile than Tinker Bell’s on a good day (today was not a good day), it wasn’t really a great idea to loiter.

"What?" Brad demanded when Kris flew in, which was the first warning sign. Brad was generally as welcoming as it took for fairies to stick around and get snared up in their admiration of him. 

The second warning was his pink glow. On any other fairy it would be embarrassment, but on Brad was a declaration of intent, like the red spots on ferocitoads or the bright, winding patterns on poisonous snakes. 

"Busy?" Kris said, couldn't help it, because he was stupid, apparently. He winced at the severe frown that cracked across Brad's face and heroically resisted the urge to backpedal, fly out of the line of fire. 

"How did you guess?" With a snap of his fingers he sent his two measuring-talent assistants scurrying away, and, affecting the air of a wronged genius, flounced down onto his squishy dandelion feather thinking chair, which was horrifically ugly, but which Brad loved to an unexplainable degree. 

“Just came to me.” 

"What do you want, sweets?” Brad waved at him, a get-on-with-it gesture, “Hurry, my time and patience is limited and my capability for violence is not."

“I’m not allowed to visit?” Kris pulled out the innocent eyes, which Katy told him didn’t work but he always fell back on like a bad habit.

Brad gave him an unreadable look. It probably masked extreme rage. “No.”

"O-kay,” Kris said, abruptly freaked out. “Can I borrow an umbrella?” 

Brad’s eyes went wide and accusing. “Are you interrupting my work day for favours?”and oh, look at that, third warning. Also: trap.

“It’s raining?” Kris said, helpfully punctuated by a boom of thunder. Half a dozen spools of silk leaning on a workbench tipped over and rolled across the ground. One bumped into Kris’ shoe. He picked it up and put in on the table and had an uncanny feeling he was about to be skewered with needles.

“Don’t you have an umbrella?” Brad scowled and tapped his fingers against his forearms. His wings quivered tightly with tension. “I know you have an umbrella, I gave you that umbrella because you lost the last one, and the one before that. I _liked_ that umbrella.”

“I didn’t lose it,” Kris said immediately, it was somewhere in his workshop. Probably. “I just forgot it. I’ll give it back, I promise.”

“You’re a curse on my existence,” Brad said, aggrieved. 

“I liked ‘benign menace,’” Kris said earnestly.

Brad was silent for a minute. Then he took a deep breath and flew up to one of his storage shells, obviously striving for patience. 

Kris instantly felt bad; the sewing talents were always overworked around festival time, and the Dazzling Colours was by far the most stressful, being the major showcase of sewing-talent works. He shouldn’t make it worse, but watching Brad overreact was kind of like watching light crystals explode, bright and enthusiastic, but with more emotional collateral. 

“Here,” Brad tossed an umbrella at Kris’ head, something delicate and likely the ugliest thing he owned, which was still more beautiful than anything of Kris’. “Now shoo, get out, I’m busy being marvelous and you are upsetting me and my fragile creative process with your hideous clothing and hair.”

“Awesome, you’re great,” Kris said, and then, distracted by the sight of the bright red dress in the corner, a full skirt of carnations and a marigold bodice with baby’s breath trim, obviously the pride of Brad’s work as it was hanging on his favourite mannequin, added, “Oh, hey, is that the dress you're making for Allison?"

“Out!” Brad shrieked, glow erupting red. Kris fled, laughing. 

It was a lazy day, hard to be productive when it was raining outside, everything muffled and subdued and what he imagined being underwater would be like, quiet. He’d rather be curled up in bed or having a nice hot cup of buttercup soup with the other fairies waiting out the weather, being entertained by an impromptu performance by the story-telling-talents, the cast of their pixie dust turned into beautiful, glittering theaters; living sets full of animals and swaying trees and lurching, giant pirates.

Procrastinating, Kris settled down at his work bench and fiddled absently with Katy’s necklace and couple of broken ladles, then went to help fix a 20 pebbled mouse cart, which needed a new axle and a mediator for the three riled tinkers who couldn’t agree between a three and five gauge twig (it needed a four). After, he went to bother Cale, who roped him into helping fix a huge pewter soup cauldron, which had a hairline fracture and a temperamental cooking-talent hovering somewhere nearby

It stopped raining long enough for Kris to be dragged into an impromptu game of Pixie Tag. He ended up with a neat bramble scratch and a head of hair Brad would beat him over having, and when it started to drizzle again, Kris settled in to fix one of Tommy’s watering cans, which had a bent spout and a dented handle. Tommy was kind of intense, for a garden-talent, more likely to intimidate his flowers into beauty than coax. 

Kris ignored the harp until he couldn’t, then he went to take a nap. 

\---

The storm was picking up speed when Kris woke up, rolling in from the cove like the tide, a brief sigh of retreat before it all crashed in with a howl of thunder. Kris flew over and covered the large window with bark blinders to keep the rain out, and shook the lamps around the room so the crystals inside would light up, casting a warm yellow glow on the walls. He rubbed his hands together, contemplative; it was the perfect night to stay in. 

It was not a perfect night for a baby’s laugh, chiming bright and delighted around his workshop, clearly audible over the roar of thunder and the sloosh of rain. 

“Uh oh.” That wasn’t good. 

By the time Kris got there, flying as fast as he dared through the winding tunnels of Tinker’s Nook, the main workshop was a frenzy of activity. Tinkers were panicking and shouting over each other, congregating around the entrance to look out at the storm swept Cottonpuff Field, hovering fretfully as the rain beat down and obscured details, bright colours oozing into shades of grey. A sudden lightning strike bleached the area sending up a chorus of screams. 

Kris spotted Cale watching the storm from an overhang and flew over to join him. 

“See anything?” Kris asked. Cale shook his head. 

Cale had taken Kris under his wing when he’d been newly laughed, fresh off the Arrival with the memory of mainland sunlight still warm against his face, the summer brush of corn leaves against his hands. He’d been the first tinker to show Kris the how-to of tinkering, the metronome tap of a hammer chasing dents, how to set order to all the ideas in his head and give him the tools to act on them. He was Kris’ best friend.

“No,” Cale said, with a great, unhappy sigh. “Bad day to be laughed.”

“We haven’t had a storm this bad in forever,” Kris said. Never Land didn’t like storms, but it certainly liked being chased by them, its own thundering predator. He wondered what this new fairy was riding in on, and hoped it something stronger than a dandelion puff.

“We haven’t had a _laugh_ in forever.”

There were a lot of Clumsies on the mainland, more than a star-counting-talent could tally in a lifetime, and while that was a lot of babies’ first laughs, most never made it to Never Land. They usually became mainland fairies, or were lost to the sea or they didn’t catch enough of a laugh to push past the mainland to begin with. Never Land was supposed to be on the lookout, but they were fragile and it was easy for them to get trapped and die away, like the most vibrant light of sunset. They hadn’t had a new Arrival since the winter change of season. It would be awful to lose one so close to home. “What’s Never Land doing?” 

“I dunno, but I heard a scout-talent say it was getting smaller, maybe it just can’t find them.” 

“But it changes all the time.” Never Land grew and shrunk whenever it wanted, and it moved around so it was never discovered by Clumsy boats. “That doesn’t make sense.” 

Cale shrugged. “Maybe Clumsies aren’t nice to their kids anymore. Maybe it’s sick of catching laughs, I don’t know.”

“Enough!” Fairy Mary yelled. Action screeched to a halt and drew Kris’ attention away from the storm. Dozens of anxious fairies gathered in a loose buzzing circle around her. She planted her fists on her stout hips and frowned at them, her auburn hair mussed out of its bun. “Everyone must calm down!”

“What do we do Fairy Mary?” 

“We can’t go out in the rain!”

“That poor laugh...”

“Teetering teapots!” Fairy Mary cried, throwing her hands in the air. “Panicking will not help at all. We need to calm down and think of a plan or we won’t be going anywhere. Does anyone have an idea?” 

“We could always walk,” someone suggested. “Get out the wagons and search on foot.”

“You wanna search Winter Woods on _foot_?”

“Are you crazy? Have you _seen_ the puddles out there?” 

Kris bit his lip and shook out his arms. Fairy wings couldn’t feel much sensation, no pain and only some pressure, but they were absorbent and worse than useless when wet. A fairy that fell in a deep puddle, or a stream, or the ocean, would sink to the very bottom and drown. The only fairy in Never Land who could swim was Rani, a water-talent who had lost her wings to the dragon Kyto a long time ago. 

“What about the balloons?” Kris said. No one could fly in this storm, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t use the skies. Everyone went quiet and looked at him, which was uncomfortable. He didn’t like being the center of such frantic attention. 

“The rain would weigh down the cotton,” Cale said, frowning. There was a collective flinch when the baby’s laugh rang through the workshop again, still bright and clear, but softer, like steam blowing away. “Or wash away the dust.” 

“We could use a leaf cover to protect the cotton, and put the dust underneath,” Tinker Bell said, flying in and setting down next to Fairy Mary. 

“That would work,” Kris said. “And I have an idea for steering - -”

It didn’t take long for the collective efforts of the tinkers, anxiously listening to the fading chime of laughter and hands moving faster and more precise for it, to fully outfit the three balloon carriers. Waxy, water resistant leaf covers (they were no sewing-talents, but they managed), long, bark wings for stability, and sycamore seed propellers to try and combat the wind. The giant balls of cotton puff that made up the balloons were damp, but a generous helping of dust got them off the ground. 

Cale, Kris and Tink clambered into the munchkin pumpkin shell basket of the first one, the smallest, and lifted off, wrapped up in two rain ponchos to protect their wings. Tink smeared dust on the bow of the basket, and they zipped out into the storm. 

It was worse than Kris was expecting, which made it appalling to experience. They had almost no control of the balloon, and the rain was freezing even under all their clothes. They were shivering in minutes, and could barely see anything past the lip of the basket, and the wind tore at the balloon covering alarmingly. They cleared a wind-torn Cottonpuff Fields, and had a near miss with a pack of fleeing bats, trying to get back to their caves now that the bugs were gone. 

“Having fun?” Cale called over the roar of the wind, whooping like this was exciting, winning disgusted looks from Kris and Tink. 

“The most,” Kris rolled his eyes. “See anything?”

“No!” Tink pointed. “Wait, over there!”

A group of water-talents were flying slowly towards them, holding up a thin blanket of water above their heads, which caught the rain and let the excess drip harmlessly to the side. They had a couple light talents with them shining harvested sunshine into the gloom from birch bark tubes. 

“Nice night!” one of the water-talents, Matt, called when their group got close enough to the balloon. Kris yanked on the rudder and was mostly successful at stabilizing them.

“My favourite,” Cale yelled back, grinning, teeth catching the glow of the light-talent’s sun, face shining wet and fierce.

“What’s wrong with you!?” Tink planted her hands on her hips.

“Find anything?” Kris yelled over them; given an audience, those two could argue for hours.

“No. We’ve checked all up Havendish Square and Sunflower gully. We’re heading toward Mermaid Lagoon, now!” There was a collective, uneasy silence at that. If the mermaids were above water, they’d all get turned into bats listening to them singing. Then the laugh rang out and they jumped back into action. It was getting quiet, the barest breadth of sound; they were running out of time. 

“Anyone gone down to the Cove?” Cale looked in the same direction as Kris, who couldn’t be quite sure, but thought that was the most likely origin point for the echo they just heard.

“Don’t know,” Matt shrugged and lost his hold on part of the water blanket, it splashed down on his head. He scowled and reformed the edges, and it would be funny any other time, the indignant look on his face (Matt didn’t like getting wet, which was strange for a water-talent, who were generally damp to begin with). “I don’t think so. They’re planning on setting off fireworks if they find it, though, so look out for them, they’ll be pretty big.”

“Wait!” Lil, one of the light-talents, yelled. She zipped into the basket and help up her canister of sunlight. “I’ll come with you, give you a hand.” 

That was lucky; the lanterns they brought with them were useless under the coal black clouds and the thick curtain of rain. Cale helped Lil into an extra poncho as they turned toward the Cove, her sunflower dress soaked and her skin covered in goosebumps. 

“We can’t get too close to the water!” Tink yelled, shielding her eyes with her arm once they reached the Cove. Lil shone her sunlight into the gloom, but Kris couldn’t make out much more than the smudge of the beach, and the terrible, roiling darkness of the ocean. “If we go down we’re done for!”

“We should avoid that,” Cale said. 

Kris yanked on the rudder, swinging them into the headwind. Tink, half out of the basket with Cale lunging to grab her belt to keep her from falling out, was peering through her water drop telescope, pointing Lil in the direction she needed light. Kris couldn’t hear the laugh anymore over the riotous clash of thunder, the roar of the waves. 

“It’s no use,” Lil called, after a while, and the resulting silence was thick with sadness. “We’re too late.” 

The wind was getting too strong and if they stayed out here any longer they’d lose more than just a laugh. They had to turn back, but it was awful, knowing that they’d failed, that they’d lost a potential friend. Cale sighed and cranked the propeller while Tink and Lil huddled in the middle of the basket, looking disheartened (Lil) and furious (Tink). Kris angled the balloon toward Home Tree with numb hands. He took one last look out over the lip of the basket, out at the monstrous, churning waves, and that’s when he saw it.

“There!” He shouted, pointing, so surprised he let go of the rudder, which sent them into a lurching spin before he course corrected. There was a minute of frantic confusion before he found it again. 

“Where?” Tink demanded, the three of them crowding the side of the basket. 

“I can’t see anything,” Cale said. 

“Me either,” said Lil.

“There, on the peninsula, the uprooted tree. It’s caught in the roots. Can you see the glow?”

“No,” said Tink, sounding frustrated. 

“Yes!” said Lil, gasping. “Oh! It’s okay. This is great!” 

“Hurry, get on the propeller,” Kris said, as the other three scrambled into action. “We need to get over there before it blows loose.” 

It took an agonizing eternity to float their way along the coast, keeping far enough away from the water to bail in case of disaster and course correcting a couple times when they almost slammed into a bowing palm tree. Kris was kind of shocked he spotted it in the first place, but that’s luck for you, and soon enough they’re debating how to get to the laugh, the open space of the peninsula yawning before them, offering no protection from the wind. 

“We’ll tether the balloon and walk,” Cale said. “It’s too exposed to take the balloon.” 

“We can’t waste any time,” argued Tink. “We’re lucky it hasn’t blown away already. We have to take the chance.”

“How much rope do we have?” Lil asked. “Can we anchor up the balloon and unspool it as we go?”

It would take Kris ten seconds flying, full sprint on a clear day, to get to the tree and the dim, flickering laugh caught up in the roots. He has never flown in the rain, though, so he didn’t know how difficult that would be, and there was always a chance that he’d get swept up in an updraft and pelted into the ocean, which would suck, but the other three were arguing and didn’t see it when a strong gust of wind tore it loose. 

Kris was out of the basket and pelting through the air before the thought registered. His poncho was ripped away immediately and the first fat drops of rain cracked over his head like rocks. He bobbed and weaved and thought he heard Cale furiously yell his name, but that could be his imagination, or thunder, and distracting besides, so he ignored it. 

The laugh (which was a feather of some kind, he could make out just barely) blew over the side of the peninsula and out over open ocean, because of course it would. But he was kind of committed now, so he overshot the overhang, had a terrible moment of vertigo looking down at the angry, seething waves reaching up for him, and kept flying. 

He was buffeted and thrown sideways and flung up on a draft, and he reeled, feeling like a dandelion puff churning under a hawk’s wings, and it took forever (okay, a couple minutes, maybe, since he was still airborne – which was a _tremendous feat_ ) and a heart stopping dive at the water to get his hands on it, scooping it up right before it was swallowed up by the crest of a frothing, raging wave. It was kind of soggy, the hairs wet and clumped, chiming weak and pitiful and afraid, but it was wonderfully warm against his frozen skin.

  


[ ](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/va_bites/26230525/10322/original.jpg)

  


He hooked right and looked up and panicked for a second; he couldn’t find the peninsula or the balloon, and the beach was a thousand wing beats away, which was crazy, because there was no way he’d flown so far, no way, couldn’t be, he wasn’t a fast-flyer. He couldn’t stop to think about it, though, or he’d go under. He was barely keeping above the water as it was. It was getting hard to move, his lungs were aching and his wings were wet and he was so cold he couldn’t feel his hands for the bitter bite of rain. And like the horrible moment of a drop when his stomach forgot that he could fly, he knew that he was about to die.

He hugged the laugh close, opening his mouth to apologize and choking on a sudden mouthful of rain, voice swallowed up in the howl of the storm. The laugh chimed softly and it was probably his imagination, but it felt like forgiveness. He never fixed Katy’s necklace, she was going to be so mad at him. 

He was about to hit the water when a lasso cinched tight around his waist and hauled him up out of the crest of a wave. He dangled there, wet and exhausted and clutching the feather. Wide eyed and a little hysterical, the relief so palpable it was like an electric shock. He didn’t laugh because that would be crazy. Cale tugged him into the basket of the balloon by the neck of his shirt, and if there had ever been a time Kris had been happier to see his scowling, furious face, he couldn’t think of it. 

“If we live through this I’m going to kill you,” he snapped, unhooking the rope and hauling his poncho over his head before jamming it on Kris, which effectively kept Kris trapped and stationary, likely on purpose. 

“Okay,” Kris said, gasping for air. “But let’s survive first.”

They were hopelessly stranded, Never Land a smudge in the distance and growing smaller as the wind pushed them farther out to sea. Tink had clambered up to the cotton to spread more dust under the tarp, just in case, and Lil was fighting with the rudder.

“What now!?” She yelled, her hair frizzing in every direction, which likely meant they were about to be hit by lightning (it was a general light-talent affliction).

“Can we wait it out?” Kris shouted. 

“I don’t think so,” Cale said, frowning. “The tarp hasn’t ripped yet, but that won’t last.”

“What about flying up through the clouds? Wait out the storm from there?”

“Same thing,” Cale yelled. “I don’t think the balloon will hold that long.” 

They shared a collective look at that, solemn and frightened, and Kris felt horrible; he would have rather Pixie Hollow only lose one fairy, not three. 

“Look!” said Lil, pointing excitedly and distracting them all from their impending doom. 

They all looked, and a second later they all cheered. Never Land was coming to save them, cutting through the ocean like a shark, or that awful ticking crocodile. As soon as they were safely over land, two of the balloon tethers snapped and sent them sprawling onto the beach. They lay there gasping in the wet, clumping sand while the balloon shot into the sky and disappeared into the clouds, a fine how you do. 

“You are so lucky you’re so lucky,” Cale told Kris, once they’d trudged up the beach and into the trees, soaked to the bone and miserable with it. There wasn’t much to say to that; he didn’t know how he got away with half the stuff he did (evidence: Brad was his friend), but there you have it. 

Lil set off a three crystal signal for help, which exploded brilliantly and vaguely made Kris wish he were a light-talent – it was just so cool okay? – and they ended up huddled up under a fern, shivering and telling terrible troll jokes and sharing Lil’s sunlight, which was warm and bright and helped dry them out a bit because well – it was sunlight. They’re wings were hopelessly sodden, but there wasn’t much they could do about that until a wing-washing-talent got a hold of them. 

The laugh gradually grew warmer and more vibrant the longer Kris held it. It was a strange feather; Kris had never seen anything like it before. It was bright blue and green and gold and looked a little like an eye. 

“Animal-talent,” Cale decreed, and Kris clued into the argument the others were having. “Animal-talents are always feathers.”

“What? No,” said Lil. “What are you even saying, I was a dove feather.” 

“There’s like four things a fairy can come in on,” Tink said, combing her fingers through her sopping blonde hair. It had come out of its bun somewhere along the way and she was trying to tame it. “Feathers, seeds, leaves and flowers. That’s not enough for all the talents.”

“I was corn silk,” Kris interrupted. 

“And grass,” Tink added. 

“Corn silk isn’t grass,” Kris said, affronted.

“Grass like,” Cale said, shrugging. 

“You - - _You_ were a feather!” Kris cried, scowling at him. “A duck feather.”

“I never said other talents couldn’t being feathers,” Cale said, shrugging. “Just that animal-talents were always feathers, and so it’s more likely to be that. They’re not mutually exclusive. Like water is always wet, but not everything wet is water.”

“That’s stupid logic,” Tink said. 

“That’s deductive reasoning,” Cale mocked. Kris opened his mouth to argue, but all the animal-talents he knew had been feathers. Hmm. 

“Archie was a pigeon,” Cale said, apparently reading Kris’ mind. 

“Fawn was a - -” Tink started, then stopped. 

“Robin,” Lil finished for her. Tink scoffed and crossed her arms and set about proving Cale wrong. 

“I’m guessing story-teller,” Kris contributed, getting back on topic. He held up the laugh. “It’s kind of flashy.”

“Acting-talent,” Lil said. “They’re always the flashiest.”

“Seacrest!” Tink yelled, puffing up and pointing, pleased as a perfectly polished pot. “Seacrest was a maple seed.”

“Seacrest is a summoning-talent,” Cale said, scowling. He didn’t get along with Seacrest, who was King Simon’s right wing fairy, and kind of a jerk. “Goes with his big mouth.” He really did have a big mouth. 

“Hmm,” Tink said, stymied. 

They were quiet for a while, exhausted and wet and grumpy with it. Kris watched the storm rage outside their little shelter and wished he were at home, sleeping or working on Katy’s necklace. Lil laid her head on his shoulder and fell into a brief, restless sleep. Cale and Tink kept arguing quietly.

By the time their rescue showed up, Kris had sailed neatly passed worried and into we’re-potentially-going-to-freeze-to-death territory. Which was a terrible place, if he was being honest, full of anxiety. It was a couple of animal-talents riding on the backs of seagulls, which Kris was a little leery of (he didn’t like birds, they smelled bad and had huge dangerous beaks and ate fish not much smaller than fairies) and they hurriedly wrapped the four of them up in blankets before ferrying them off to Home Tree, where they received a hero’s welcome and steaming cups of tea and forcibly bundled up in a change of clothes. 

Looking frazzled and furious, Katy swept through the crowd of well-wishers and congratulators and punched Kris on the shoulder before wrapping him up in a fiercely aggressive hug. 

“Stupid fairy! I was _so worried about you_ ,” she said, the words muffled into his neck. He hugged her back, hating that she was scared, and they huddled up on one of the platform mushrooms growing out the tree branch and settled in to watch the Arrival. 

Arrival Day, barring unforeseen circumstances (example: today and its many tragic failings), was generally systematic. An Arrival was ushered in to Home Tree on the winds of a fast-flying fairy and anointed with its first cup of pixie dust, transforming the magic of a baby’s first laugh into a new fairy life. It was generally well attended because while they all pretended it didn’t exist and the King would kill them if he knew, there was an incredibly vicious and elaborate betting pool over the prospective talent of an Arrival. Kris had stopped a while ago, because Charles was kind of ruthless as a debt collector and Kris still owed him a set of sea glass nesting bowls and possibly indentured servitude because whatever luck he had didn’t extend to illicit gambling.

“What’s your guess?” Katy asked, because she was also a ruthless opportunist. 

“Oh, no,” Kris said, fending her off with a shake of his head. He was starting to warm up and the feeling like various important bits of his body were about to snap off was dissipating. “Oooh, no. No way, I’ve suffered enough tonight.”

“I’m thinking art-talent,” Katy decided, ignoring him. 

The laugh was placed in the center of the Arrival dais, the platform that served as the crown of Home Tree, the carved heart and origin point of all of Home Tree’s branches, well trodden and polished by years of fairy feet. It was lit up by the Pixie Dust falls cascading down from the upper branches. The various fairies settled, bunched up in groups of their talents. Kris could still hear the storm shrieking, but it sounded far away, muffled. Home Tree’s leaves were thick enough to keep the water out. 

King Simon appeared in a blinding flash of gold, followed by the Ministers of the seasons. Terence, a dusk-keeper, flew up with a cup of pixie dust. There was a collective inhale of anticipation as the dust fell on the laugh, and the green and blue hairs of the feather lit up and transformed. 

Katy took a deep, surprised breath. “Changed my mind,” she said, a little breathlessly, “Kitchen-talent.”

“Is that a guess or wishful thinking?” Kris asked, grinning around a laugh. There were a number of excited murmurs as the new fairy stood up. 

He was tall, with broad shoulders and strong arms and black hair that caught the light of the falls and glittered like polished Never silver. His arrival garment was wrapped around him, green and blue and gold, and strangely asymmetrical, a vest with one long sleeve and pants with splotched colours. His wings, limp as they were without magic, were huge and out of the corner of Kris’ eye he saw Danny of the fast-flyers straighten up and take notice. It made Kris hope that the new fairy didn’t have _any_ talent rather than a fast-flying one. 

He knew he was being unfair, fast-flyers were a very rare talent, and important besides. They went to the mainland and their winds were responsible for bringing in _all_ the seasons, but most of them were arrogant and rude and puffed up on how vital they were. There was general animosity between them and the tinkers, and Danny was an unfortunately exceptional example of a fast-flyer. 

“What?” Katy turned and followed Kris’ line of sight. He couldn’t see it from the back of her head, but he knew instinctively she rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry, he looks too nice to be a fast-flyer.” She patted him on the arm. It was true, he guessed, the new fairy had a wide, happy grin like he was just so excited to be here, so happy so much for the invite. The excited murmuring died down as King Simon flew toward the new fairy, his arms crossed and big golden wings trailing dust. 

“Well, we haven’t had such an exciting Arrival in years,” he said drily. There was a smattering of laughter. “And now that we’re all settled, are you all right?”

“I think so,” the fairy said, he spun in place. “Wow, this is impressive. Where am I?”

“Never Land, you were brought here on the winds of a storm,” Simon said, frowning. Kris had never seen him smile, so he was pretty sure it didn’t mean anything. “Let’s hope that’s not prophetic, hmm? Turn around.” 

The new arrival turned around. The King reached out, pinched his limp wings and lifted them up, infusing them with Never magic. The arrival grinned and laughed and lifted off the ground. His wings were big, clear as crystal, the veining chaotic, with swooping curls and lines, but pretty nonetheless.

“This is great!” Kris knew the feeling. That first rush of excitement taking off from the ground was a little breathtaking, even now. Clumsies couldn’t fly, which boggled Kris’ mind; their lives must be so empty. 

“Yes, it is, come down,” Simon said, sounding impatient but looking vaguely amused. “It’s time to discover your talent.”

With that said, a couple dozen toadstools curled out of bark in a circle, prompting the exemplars of the talents to fly in and set down their talent symbols. Tink had to walk to place the hammer of the tinkers, since her wings were still wet. There was a dew drop for the water-talents, a small tornado for the fast-flyers, a snowflake for the ice-talents, and so on until all the talent symbols were floating gently above a toadstool, waiting to be tested. 

“What do I do?” asked the arrival, smiling. Kris remembered his own arrival, wondering with an irrational fear whether he had a talent at all or if he was going to disappoint anyone by not having the right one, and being so relieved when the tinker hammer finally glowed in his hands and he was ushered into the ranks of his new family. This arrival didn’t seem at all nervous (lucky), just happy to be there, confident and unconcerned that he was under such intense scrutiny.

“Pick one,” Simon said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “If it doesn’t work, pick another.” 

He wasn’t a water-talent, or a light, or an animal. The fast-flying twister died to a pathetic little breeze before he even got close to it, which made Kris inordinately happy. He wasn’t a tinker either, which Kris had figured, but was still a little disappointed about. Tinkering wasn’t a rare talent, exactly, but it wasn’t one of the nature talents either, which were far more likely to get a new fairy than something like tinkering or baking. 

The arrival went down the list of other talents (garden, smith, art, kitchen, all a no go), but he didn’t look like he was panicking, which Kris would have done in his place. 

Finally, he stopped in front of a music note made of pixie dust, which shimmered and fluttered like a leaf in the breeze. He stopped in front of it, cocked his head to the side and reached for it. His fingers hadn’t even touched it before it started glowing, brilliant and bright like a tiny sun.

  


[ ](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/va_bites/26230525/10650/original.jpg)

  


“Singer,” King Simon said. “Fascinating, we haven’t had one of those in a while. What’s your name?”

“Adam,” he said, holding the music note in his hands, looking a little stunned.

“Everyone, welcome Singer Adam.” A cheer went up, and the music-talents (there were only about eight singers in Pixie Hollow, so they’d been adopted by the general music-talents posse) crowded around their new compatriot. Allison was beside herself with joy, buzzing around Adam’s head. Kris yawned. The King held up his hands. “All right, that’s over with. Everyone get to bed.”

\---

By morning, the storm had simmered down to a few grouchy showers and a fine layer of dew and the fresh smell of success, which Kris didn’t get to enjoy because his _entire body_ felt like he’d flown into a tree and gotten crushed under a rock and stepped on by the Never Bear and eaten by the Golden Hawk, stiff and sore and unhappy.

“Help,” he said, weakly flailing in Katy’s direction when she flew in at lunch with a pot of tea and a sandwich. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

“It’s funny how flying into a storm and being stupid and almost dying can do that to you,” she said, because she was super mean like that, but she gave him food, which was almost an apology. 

“How’s the new guy?” he asked, shoving the sandwich in his mouth. It was delicious, acorn butter and bananas on fresh wheat bread. 

“Allison’s adopted him,” she said, curling up next to him with her own cup of tea. “I have never seen her so excited. Like, a thousand presents and a new dress. It’s creeping me out a little.”

Kris grinned. “So he’s settling in fine?”

“He came around the Tearoom the morning while you were busy being a bump on a log.” Katy shrugged. “Seemed fine, maybe a little overwhelmed. He smiles an awful lot. I don’t remember being that happy when I arrived.”

“I remember you being incredibly mean and nasty when you arrived,” Kris said, ducking his head and grinning. 

Around a laugh, Katy said, “Shut up.” 

“You held me hostage with cookies and cupcakes and sandwiches until I was your friend. It was awful. I’ve repressed most of it.”

Katy punched him on the shoulder and dragged him out of bed. The excitement of yesterday had already faded, and while a bunch of fairies were still congratulatory, everyone was too busy to spend much time patting Kris on the back. Besides, Kris still had a harp to fix, and rumour had it the King was getting antsy enough to do an inspection, so he needed to get his wings in gear. 

The next couple of days were hectic and stressful, and add to that, everyone seemed to have a new story about Adam. He helped Tommy carry buckets of paint for his flowers, he let Brad dress him up (which was the most cutthroat way to Brad’s heart), Allison was in prolonged _raptures_ having a new singer buddy, and even Cale had good things to say about him, and that was fine, he seemed like a genuinely nice guy. It was just that Kris had _saved_ him, and he hadn’t even seen him yet. He shouldn’t be disappointed, but he kind of was. 

“Well, if you weren’t holed up in your workshop like a mole, maybe you’d have a chance to meet him,” Katy said, completely unsympathetic when he complained about it to her. She stuffed a muffin in his mouth and for the next hour proceeded to gush about how polite Adam was and how friendly he was and how enthusiastic he’d been about trying her experimental baking while cupcakes rose. Which was incredibly brave, Kris thought, but would never say out loud because he wanted to keep his wings. “Stop being so anti-social,” were her parting words of wisdom.

  


[ ](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/va_bites/26230525/10191/original.jpg)

  


He recognized he was being ridiculous but the embarrassment over all his whining was kind of awful, so he decided to avoid it and hid in his workshop, citing the festival and having made less than no progress on the harp. It was almost week before Kris had the chance to formally meet Adam, and by chance meeting, it was more of a stealth ambush. Kris suspected Katy interference.

Kris was indulging in some dramatic self pity when someone behind him said, “Looks complicated,” and scared him so bad he almost fell off his stool. 

“Are you okay?” Adam said, as Kris gasped for breath. He was smiling, but he looked a little concerned over Kris’ impending heart failure. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” 

“It’s fine,” Kris said. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Adam said. There was a moment of awkward silence. “Kris, right?”

“Oh, uh, yeah,” Kris said. “And you’re Adam.” 

Well this was brutal. He must look awful, he probably _smelled_ awful. Katy had been bringing him food, but he hadn’t changed clothes in three days, caught up in the throes of a success that hadn’t panned out. Adam looked so put together it was kind of agonizing, dressed up in the white rose petals of the singing-talents, with his hair neatly spiked. What a first impression.

“You’re kind of a hard fairy to track down,” Adam said, leaping straight in. He leaned against Kris’ work bench, looking over all the little pieces of the king’s harp, his wings fluttering lazily.

“I’ve - - been busy, as you can, uh, probably tell. You - - wanted to meet me?” he said, pathetically pleased. 

“Yeah, there’s this crazy rumour going around that you saved my life.” He turned and looked at Kris, grinning, like he was letting Kris in on a secret, an inside joke. Kris smiled back, couldn’t help it. He had very black hair, but it had shines of blue in it, like his arrival feather. 

“It wasn’t just me,” Kris said, because it wasn’t fair at all to take that much credit. “I had help.”

“I know, I just - - wanted to come and let you know how grateful I am,” Adam said. “Really, just, I. Don’t remember much. I mean, it was kind of - - blurry I guess, like a dream, but I know you almost died.”

“It’s fine,” Kris said quickly, feeling awkward. Anyone in his place would have done the same thing; it wasn’t anything special. He rubbed the back of his neck and hoped he wasn’t glowing pink. “No really, I’m just glad I wasn’t too late.” 

“Ha, me too,” Adam said, then added a little sheepishly, “Katy told me where you worked.” 

“Traitor,” Kris said, grinning, “I told her I was avoiding you,” joking obviously, but it was probably a jerk thing to say, he thought abruptly. Adam just looked surprised for a moment, and then burst out laughing. He patted Kris on the shoulder. 

“She told me you were funny.” 

“Sounds like she’s been telling you a lot of things.” That worried him. Katy has been Kris’ friend almost as long as Cale. They shared a terrible, embarrassing co-existence. 

“I’m really charming,” Adam said with a grin. He added, a little circumspect, “I also whined a whole lot. She might have been trying to get rid of me.” 

“She’s like that,” Kris agreed. “Also, if she ever tries to tell you about that time with the - - actually, never mind, forget I said that. Don’t believe anything she tells you. She lies.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Adam laughed. “What are you working on?”

“The King’s harp,” Kris said, latching onto a conversation he wasn’t going to embarrass himself over. He turned and spread his hands out over the various bits and pieces of his project. “For the festival. He plays it to start the opening ceremonies. It won’t stay tuned, but I can’t figure out why. I thought it had something to do with the string tension cracking the casing, but that - - didn’t pan out.” 

He tried keeping it simple, because Katy told him once that he got a little overwhelming when he really got into the nitty-gritty of tinkering, but Adam looked suitably impressed so Kris got kind of excited and somehow ended up delving into the relative merits of Singing maple versus Home Tree oak for a sturdy sound box. 

“So, yeah,” Kris said, faltering, after he realized just how much he’d been talking on a tangent; he was probably boring Adam to tears. “I’ve refitted all the pins, so hopefully that works, because if it doesn’t. I don’t know, I’ll be sad.”

“Well we can’t have that,” Adam said, looking excited, wings fluttering. It was a little unnerving to Kris, who normally didn’t get this reaction when he talked shop with non tinkers. “Let’s try it out.”

It was the fastest he’d ever put the harp back together. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work, but he was able to pluck out a couple notes of his favourite song before it went jarringly out of tune. 

Kris sighed. Adam frowned. “What happens if you can’t fix it?”

“I dunno, shame, ridicule, exile,” Kris said, grumpily. 

“What!” Adam said, alarmed. Kris startled, forgetting that he’d only met Adam an hour ago and that wasn’t nearly enough time to get used to fatalism from a stranger.

“Um, no,” Kris said quickly, “It’s probably nothing, the King only started playing at the festival a couple years ago. If I can’t get it fixed, he just won’t play, or the music-talents will just play his song. It’s just, you know, an intense personal failure.” 

“I’m sure he knows you tried your best,” Adam said after a moment. Kris got the impression that Adam was one of those fairies that was immediately and relentlessly loyal. 

“I hope so,” Kris said. He ducked his head and smiled. 

Adam had to leave shortly after that, but not before extracting a promise to meet up for lunch or breakfast or a bit of exploration, what do you say, show me around. It mostly involved Adam being enthusiastic and Kris nodding along, a little lost, until Adam said, “Great! I’ll see you soon!” and zipped off. 

\---

“Crap, crap, crap.” Kris said, a week later. He was late and it wasn’t his fault! It was hard to keep track of time when he was tinkering. When he got to the Tearoom, Adam was holding court with Allison and Katy around a small table with a big plate of muffins. He grinned at Kris when he saw him. 

“Over here!” He waved. Kris almost tripped himself onto the floor catching his foot on the back of a chair as flew over to their table. He took the seat next to Allison and helped himself to Katy’s tea, which she swatted at him, but didn’t actually protest. 

“Hi, I know, I’m late, I’d fly backwards. Cale needed my help, there was a dye pot turning everything green and blue polka-dots and - - never mind, doesn’t matter. What are we talking about?”

“You,” Katy batted her eyelashes sweetly. “But now you’re here and it’s only fun if it’s behind your back.”

“Good things or bad things?”

“Terrible, awful things.”

“I can leave if you want,” Kris grabbed a muffin, and he must not be too late because it was still warm, “Or turn my chair around. I don’t mind.”

“We’re talking about the festival,” Allison said, switching tracks and clapping her hands together, vibrating in her seat. “Kris! Kris! Aren’t you excited. I’m _so_ excited. It’s going to be so awesome. I can’t wait to wear my dress! This is going to be the best Dazzling Colours _ever_.”

“I think I saw it, your dress,” Kris said. “With the red carnations, right?”

“Yeah, I’m going in for my final fitting today. Brad’s really outdone himself this time. It’s so pretty,” Allison giggled and took off, doing a victory lap around the table. She settled back in her chair and grinned with her dimples. “I’m gonna look _awesome_.”

“Careful,” Adam warned, but he was smiling too. “Brad has high hopes for that dress. He’s expecting nothing less than first.”

“Remember last year?” Katy said abruptly, and Kris could feel the blood drain from his face. Allison’s smile slipped away. 

“What happened last year?” Adam propped himself up on an elbow and looked between them. 

“Brad lost,” Kris said. “To his protégé, Cassidy. It was... hazardous. To be around him for a while.” 

Cassidy had been a brand new sewing-talent at the time, Brad a sewing darling and the reigning champion of the Dazzling Colours. The immediate aftermath had been an awful, militant, sabotage kind of thing, but they shared a cheerfully explosive rivalry now, based entirely around one-upmanship and companionable derision. Not a lot about Brad made sense to Kris.

“Wow,” Adam said. He looked at Allison with wide uncertain eyes. “So this is kind of important to him then.”

“Yeah,” Allison shrugged. She perked up. “You should let him dress you up, Kris,” Allison rested her chin on her palms, grinning cheekily. “Cassidy would, like, die of envy, and poof, there goes our problem.”

“Brad would die of shock,” Kris said. “I’m pretty sure he only asks anymore out of habit. Also, no.”

“What?” 

“Oh,” Kris said. “Uh, when I first Arrived, Brad said he wanted to dress me up properly, because that’s what he does, right. But I kind of didn’t understand that it was his talent, and - - I had just got there, okay! And someone was already telling me I was doing something wrong, and so I said no.” He still didn’t know what the problem was; they may not be _couture_ (Brad’s word), but the simple green tinker outfits were perfectly functional.

“Nobody says no to Brad,” Katy stole her tea back from Kris and sipped it. “It was a novel and unacceptable experience for him.”

“Maybe you should let him,” Adam laughed, “Just once, to see the look on his face.”

“He’s like a rat with a moldy piece of cheese no one wants to eat but will anyway because it’s that or starvation or give it to someone else,” said Allison. “He’s greedy.”

There was a moment of silence. “Really, that’s what it’s like? Are you sure?” Kris said. Allison stuck her tongue out at him as Katy said, “He’ll never leave you alone.” 

“When does he ever?” Kris complained, because he didn’t. 

“So hey, Adam’s going to be singing during the festival,” Allison danced through conversations like she zipped through a music score, fast and whimsical and with energy. “With me, he’ll be singing with me, during the opening dance. You haven’t heard him sing yet, have you, Kris? He’s _great_ , you’re in for a treat. Here, listen, show him, Adam.”

Adam waved her off with a smile, “Maybe later.” 

Kris blinked, “Isn’t it a bit soon for you to be singing solo at a festival? I mean - - no offence,” he added hastily. “I’m sure you’re great and everything, but what about the other singers? Do they think it’s fair?”

“Duet,” Allison corrected, “And you just gotta trust me on this. Adam’s so much better than them it’s kind of stupid, so whatever, who cares what they think.”

“Allison,” Katy said, but the twitching corners of her frown gave her away.

“What?” Allison rolled her eyes in an extra involved way with her whole face and some of her upper body. It struck Kris how young looking she was, for all that she was laughed up a year after Kris himself. “It’s true, they all know it.”

“We asked,” Adam clarified with a shrug, “They said it was fine.” 

“Oh, well, congratulations, then.”

They talked about the festival for a while, and then about Adam’s first few days in Pixie Hollow, which seemed remarkably glamorous for how ordinary it was. Then Katy asked about the development of such and such a scandalous relationship and Allison, mostly unprompted, burst into a scribe-talent rendition of all prevalent Pixie Hollow gossip of interest (summary: there was a lot). It was also a bit too in depth for Kris. He liked a dash of mystery to his acquaintances.

“The animal-talents are collecting honey today.” He stood up and looked at Adam, feeling abruptly self-conscious, like everyone in the Tearoom was looking at him and judging. He rolled the edge of the tablecloth between his fingers; daisies today. “Wanna check it out?”

It was stupid to ask, he knew, Adam probably had to practice, and there were a million different things more interesting than watching bees dance, and Kris didn’t even know why he bothered because as Danny was so fond of pointing out, fairies like Adam didn’t hang out with fairies like Kris. 

“Sure,” Adam said, to Kris’ immense surprise, throwing back the rest of his tea and setting down his cup, taking wing and looking at Kris expectantly. “I’ll catch up with you two later.”

Honey Day was a once a year event, where the collective community of animal-talents all banded together in the tradition of fairies who have seen things no one should see, to lead the bees of Honeycomb Caverns through the bouncy and exacting dances of the frantically distracting. _Look here, look what we’re doing, fun right?_ while the rest of them, in desperate, militant precision and outfitted with acorn buckets and protective bark coverings, collected honey. It took all afternoon, and there were a number of nurse-talents flying in the wings, just in case.

“This is amazing.” Adam smiled at him, entranced with the brilliant winding patterns the animal-talents were shaping out of the bees. Kris, who had seen it all before but could still call up the feeling of wonderment seeing firsthand how truly amazing the other talents were, grinned and ducked his head, happy to share. 

“I did it once,” Kris said, wondering if he actually wanted to tell this story, it being deeply humiliating and which Katy had assured him was intensely hilarious. 

“Oh yeah?”

“Sometimes they let tinkers help collect if there’s not enough hands. So this one year, I volunteered. But, uh, Brad had been experimenting with this new perfume of his and I got too close to the queen - - she doesn’t leave the combs, I didn’t know that - - which, I know, dumb, inform yourself before you do something dangerous, I know. But I’d never been inside before and I was curious! So she wouldn’t let me leave. And Archie - - Archie?”

“Animal-talent.” Adam had that look on his face like he was ready and willing to fall into intense psychological mockery. This may have been a bad idea. “Shy, kind of high-strung?”

“That’s the one.” He choked down a laugh; it was mean, but kind of true. “Anyway, Archie said I smelled like Ever Flowers, which, I don’t know, Ever Flowers are supposed to smell like skunks. And I know Brad would suffer for his art, or whatever, but I can’t see him willingly submitting himself to that on a whim.” 

“Probably why he tried it out on you,” Adam suggested. “And not on himself.”

“Well, he never did use it after that,” Kris agreed, with the cheerful mutiny of a fairy on the edge. “So they had to mount this rescue party to get me out, right? And the bees were upset and a couple fairies got stung because they were taking away their mother’s concubine, or official egg sack, or whatever they call it. It was all very dramatic. I got a rash.”

Adam was silent for a minute, then he snorted into his hand and fell back against the sunflower they were sitting on in a fit, wings fluttering and kicking up bits of pollen, which caught in his black hair and looked like beads of sunlight. “ _No._ ”

“I’m banned from Honey day,” Kris admitted, because it was embarrassing, but if it made Adam laugh, bright and a little chocked, so it was kind of okay. “Stray bees follow me around sometimes, looking for Daddy.”

While Kris was definitely banned from collection, no one would say no to them taking a couple buckets back to Home Tree. They were a little heavy and very sticky, which Kris didn’t mind but Adam agonized over, a look on his face like he was contemplating dumping all on Kris’ head. After that they headed back to the Tearoom for dinner where Adam was immediately snatched up by Brad for some garment fitting or another. 

“Careful,” Katy said when he flopped into a chair next to her, supremely Not Caring and scowling in the direction of fashion. She passed him a bowl of soup and a plate of roasted mushrooms, all of which smelled delicious. “You’re jealous is showing.”

“Ha, you’re funny.” Kris sipped at his soup. Pumpkin, yum. “Just, hilarious.”

She eyed him. “Someone’s in a bad mood,” which was totally unfair; Kris was just tired. It had been a long day. “Fine, let’s talk about me. That’ll cheer you up.”

“Always does.” He wasn’t even lying. Katy always had something interesting to talk about. He popped a mushroom cap in his mouth and settled in; Adam didn’t even know what he was missing.

\---

A couple weeks later and cutting it extra close, Kris got his breakthrough the day before the festival, which was handy, because Kris had been fending off summoning-talents and invitations for games and Adam’s hopeful eyes (he felt bad about that) all week and he was starting to feel harassed. 

It was mostly thanks to Adam, who had handily ignored Kris’ protests of solitude and flown in that morning looking deeply hunted, saying, “Allison,” as an explanation, which was a fair reason if there ever was one. 

Adam sat down next to Kris’ workbench, laid his head down on his crossed arms, and went promptly to sleep, secure in the knowledge he was in a safe space of confidential friendship. Kris would have worried about if not for the fact that he was experiencing a truly measureless amount of anxiety that had manifested as a super awful lower back pain, so he literally could not be bothered for anything less than the total destruction of Never Land. 

Point was, Adam fell asleep while Kris continued his exercise in futility, and about an hour into it and on the tail end of a restless head toss, some of the dust in Adam’s hair sprinkled loose over the bench top and settled, golden and sparkling, amongst the various bits and pieces of Kris’ continuous drain of sanity.

As a rule, it was a spectacularly awful decision to use pixie dust on Never Silver. They were two very different magical substances, and once Kris had seen a Never Silver kettle, after a dust bath, become so bitterly enraged over the quality of tea it was brewing that it had taken the entire Tearoom hostage. It had taken four animal-talents and a quick thinking water-talent to bring it down before it gave anyone else second degree, chamomile burns. 

With something as delicate as the King’s harp, with all its fiddly bits and lynching strings, the results could be disastrous. But Kris was decidedly desperate enough, and, sticking a note to Adam’s forehead telling him where he was going, he flew out to the Dust Depot. 

Not counting the Tearoom, the Dust Depot was generally the busiest place in Pixie Hollow at any given hour, with dust-keepers grinding dust into a softer, finer product, and measuring out bundles of it to be sent out to fairy outposts all over Never Land. It was the organizational force for Pixie Hollow’s magical network, and was loud and frantic, with so much unrefined dust floating around in the air that Kris sneezed twice before he got to the main distribution desk. Fairy Gary was in the middle of an intense argument with a couple dust-keepers, pouring over reports. 

“Fly with you,” Terence said, catching sight of him, just as Cook threw his arms in the air and shouted, “I’m just saying - -”

“I hear what yer sayin’ lad,” said fairy Gary, who patted his round belly and scrubbed the thick handlebar of his mustache. “But we cannae go rushin’ to no conclusions - -”

“I’m not rushing to anything! We’re _down our quota!_ ”

“Fly with you,” Kris murmured to Terence, craning his neck curiously over his shoulder while Terence led him away. “What’s going on?”

Terence shrugged, and then grinned that helpless smile of someone fighting the urge to commit workplace violence. “Just inventory, what can I help you with?”

It took a bit of finagling (dust-keepers were militant about the rules of dust distribution, one cup a day and one cup only; Terence was a buddy) but Kris ended up with half a cup of extra dust and was back in his workshop half an hour later, closing all the windows and doors and hoping this didn’t end in an explosion, because that also happened once, and there was a patch of Sunflower Gully that didn’t grow right to this day. 

Giving into the cheerful sense of impending doom with reckless abandon, Kris put the stupid harp back together and, carefully watching for signs of volatile distemper, rubbed down the strings, and then the rest of it because why not, he was kind of committed at this point and also impatient. He had a bit of a panic attack when the whole thing floated off the table for a minute, but that lasted as long as it took to brush away the extra bits of dust off the top. 

Because of some kind of cosmic injustice, it played perfectly the first time, which was horrendously annoying, but then again last measures were last measures, and at least this way he knew it wasn’t because he was an awful tinker or anything. Magic could only fix magic. Tinker Bell probably would have thought of it earlier, but she was a much more adventurous soul than Kris, and it was fixed, that was the important bit.

“You did it!” Adam said from where he was propped up on his elbow at the other end of the table. Kris, who in the sweet grasp of giddy victory had been merrily plucking away at a simple song to the exclusion of all else, yelped and fell sideways off his stool. 

“You okay?” Adam called, sounding unconcerned.

“You trying to kill me?” Kris shot back, because he had only enough in him for one emotionally wrought surprise a day, even though he was totally laughing with the joy of it, because his body was traitorous. 

Adam ignored him, which wasn’t a surprise. “Play something.”

“I’m not a music-talent,” Kris reminded him, flying over to his tool box and putting his things away, his hands shaking a bit, which happened, sometimes, getting something right after so long. This had been his longest one by far, but there had been other, less intensive projects that had resulted in the same. 

“So?” Adam asked, with an extra helping of belligerence. “Do it anyway. Come on, I just heard you.”

“That was just a couple cords. That’s not how it works.” Kris smiled at him absently, and was a little worried about the scowl on Adam’s face. “What?”

Adam shook his head, but looked annoyed. “I just - - nothing. Never mind.”

“Doesn’t seem like nothing.” Kris was getting a little irritated; this was his victory time. 

“You ever think it’s stupid that our talents are decided for us?” Adam said into a long minute of silence. 

“Not really?” Kris had never thought about it, honestly. When the tinker hammer had glowed at Kris’ Arrival, all he could think was _yes_ this was what he wanted. Like flying – it was just instinctual. “Do you?...” He didn’t know what to say. All the fairies he knew loved their talents. He swallowed and ventured, “Do you not like your talent?” It felt awful to say and worse to think about.

Adam opened his mouth and then clicked it shut and looked miserable, which Kris was immediately alarmed about, but all Adam said was, “No, I love it. It’s just - - what if I didn’t? What if I wanted to be a light-talent or a sewing-talent? What then?”

“But you don’t.” He just wanted to be clear. 

“Well - - no.”

“I - - don’t think there is a what if,” Kris said, flying over and putting his hand on Adam’s shoulder. “I think you just know, and that’s all there is. I know Tink didn’t want to be a tinker for a while, but that was mostly because she was jealous tinkers didn’t go to the mainland. You know how she is about tinkering.” He meant it to be comforting, but Adam just looked sad. 

“It just doesn’t seem fair.” Adam looked out the window and admitted, a little like he didn’t want to, like he’d rather pull out his wings, “I think you would be a great music-talent.”

Oh, Kris thought. Tinkering wasn’t glamorous; it was hard, dirty work and sometimes Kris felt more like a mole than a fairy with how much time he spent inside away from the open sky, and he’d heard all the petty things the more magical talents said about his own. But - - 

“I mean, I guess you could, with some things. It’s - - I mean. It’s different for the nature talents. We can’t catch light, and we can’t make ice. And maybe for the other ones, I could practice and practice and one day be as good on one instrument as a brand new music-talent could be on all of them. But I’d never be as happy as I am tinkering, I know that. I’m happy,” Kris said, because he was, and as sweet as it was for Adam to want more for Kris, it wasn’t really his place, and kind of insulting besides. “You gotta trust me, Adam. I love my talent. Like you love yours. I wouldn’t change it for anything.”

“I guess,” Adam said. “Just seems like we should have more potential than that. Tommy told me Clumsies could be anything they wanted.” 

Tommy would definitely know more about Clumsies than Kris, who had heard all the stories but had no real life experience. There was Captain Hook and his pirates, and Peter Pan and his Lost Boys, of course, but they were as much a fixture of Never Land as the fairies themselves, or the mermaids, so he kind of doubted they could be held to any kind of normal Clumsy standard. 

“I heard Clumsies torture and kill bugs for art,” he decided on, because ever since he heard that he always felt the intense need to share, like commiserating over some kind of terrible accident.

Adam did an elaborate double take. “Do they really? That’s awful.”

“Yeah, they put them in glass cases with metal thorns stuck through them.”

Adam laughed; it sounded shocked out of him, eyes wide and alarmed, looking about as horrified as Kris felt. 

“They tried to do it to Tink once. She got caught and they were going to put her up in a mew-sum.”

“What’s a mew-sum?”

“I dunno, but it sounds awful.” Kris tapped on the harp sound box. “Come on, help me take this thing back to the king.”

“Did you hear that?” Adam prevaricated, putting a hand to his ear, because he was actively a terrible fairy. “I think that was Allison, I should probably go check it out.” 

Kris grinned with all his teeth and snagged one of Adam’s aft wings. “Just try it, I dare you.”

\---

Kris didn’t see Adam at all the next day. He saw Allison once, panicking and being disruptive before Brad whisked her away to get dressed, followed by Katy, who was a calming influence. 

He did a few odd jobs, stacking woven crab grass balls of light crystals and fixing chairs and helping out where he could, staying out of the way more often than not. Matt was crafting elegant bubble sculptures, and Lil was arguing with a bunch of light-talents over the placement of the catapults. Before he knew it, dusk was settling in, dark and grumpy like a bear, and Katy was descending on him like a vengeful hawk in a pretty pink daisy dress. 

“Why aren’t you dressed yet?” she demanded, shoving him away from the sound stage he was helping put up, and being generally very rude. 

“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” he asked, which was a mistake, judging by the look of terrible vengeance in her eyes. He was wearing his best tinker uniform. There was only one hole and it was by the hem. You couldn’t even see it. Admittedly, he was kind of dirty. 

“Kris so help me, this is a big night for a lot of your friends; you will look nice if it’s the last thing I do!” She promised, and he held up his hands in surrender and let her drag him to her room, because she looked a little rage-y, and Kris liked breathing as a concept. She thrust a neatly folded pile of clothes into his hands and stared him down at him until he changed. 

“Did Brad make these?” he asked, pulling his arms through the sleeve of a yellow daisy shirt, his pants dark woven mouse fur, and it wasn’t too bad, except for the crushing humiliation of defeat.

“...No.” Katy decided on. 

“He’s not going to let me live this down.”

“I do not even care a little bit,” she sniffed, holding her head high. 

He changed with about as much petulance as he thought he could get away with, and then, when she looked about a degree away from seething rage remembered, “Wait, before I forget,” and pulled out her repaired necklace out of his satchel, which he’d found the time to fix it after he and Adam had dropped off the harp. With a grin she curtained her hair back so he could fasten it around her neck. 

She was silent for a minute and looked alarmingly damp around the eyes as she rolled some of the new glass beads he’d tacked on. “Aw, Kris, it looks lovely.”

They were almost late, which Katy was near violent about (she was never late for anything; it was a baking-talent affliction). But they had seats right up front because Brad had graciously saved them spots for the toll price of his extravagant gloating. 

“Don’t you look nice?” He said, with that extra snide little smile of a fairy who knows when he’s won the war. 

The stage was a giant stack of interwoven sunflowers, with the music-talent symphony clustered on the upper tiers and the animal-talent led bug orchestra in a small dugout in front, the cricket violinists strumming anxiously on their back legs. Once the sun was fully set, the firefly spotlights lit up the center stage, paving the way for three music-talents to bring in the king’s harp. 

Kris had probably been irritating with his exactingly specific instructions about set up, how to brush it down with dust as a precaution right before the king played, probably being annoying to the fairies whose actual _lives_ revolved around keeping instruments happy, but it was still nerve-wracking, and he held Katy’s hand hostage all through the king’s concert, which was a rousing rendition of A Dance With Wings. It was beautiful but not breathtaking (the king didn’t have a specific talent, more of an amalgamation of all of them). But it was still better than anything Kris could have done. And since it didn’t go out of tune and shame Kris’ entire existence as a fairy and a tinker, Kris could relax.

“Here we go,” Katy said, excited as Brad grabbed Kris’ other hand as the king finished up his song and his opening speech and the stage plunged into darkness. 

When the spotlights came back on, Adam and Allison were hovering in the middle of the stage, Allison in her breathtaking carnation dress, her hair pinned up in elaborate curls and Adam wearing dark silvery grey and forget-me-not blue, cold where Allison was a snapping lick of fire. And because Allison could only ever be herself, there was no gradual build up of song, just the first opening notes of the of the symphony and an audience-wide suck of breath before she dove into it, a belted out note so high and pure and happy it plucked them right out of their mushroom cap chairs and threw them willy-nilly into the tale of Mira Joywing, the first ever sewing-talent. 

The story went, Mira Joywing had sewn a dress out of the finest threads of Never Silver as a gift to the moon fairy, Luna Starshine, who, after trying to take her sister, the sun’s, place in the sky, had been horribly burned and had fled into exile. Allison was perfect for it. Her voice skipped and danced through the stitches of a needle and slid down the kitten curl of a skirt, and Kris found himself bopping along because Allison took such joy in her music and it was so easy to see, to get swallowed up in the tale she weaved as easily as the story-tellers built their sets of light. 

Then Adam started singing. 

Objectively, Kris knew that Adam was a rare singer; his glow upon finding his talent totem had been bright, like the Second Star, nearly blinding. Katy had told him Kris’ glow had also been very bright, once upon a time, but Kris was sure that had been circumstance; he didn’t remember it being that way at all. 

A very rare talent, a burgeoning exemplar, glows the brightest. And Adam’s had been very bright indeed. 

“Wow,” Katy breathed in that hit-in-the-face-ow-my-nose stunned way Kris felt.

Adam was Luna Starshine, and his voice was _amazing_. It soared as high as the sun, crashed into the lows of the moon’s jealousy, turned terrible with burning agony, suffocating with the misery of exile and horror at her injuries, Never Land stagnating without a moon. 

Katy sniffled, and Brad clamped down on Kris’ hand, and Kris felt abruptly cored out in a way he wasn’t expecting, surprised that it happened anyway, like he’d never be happy again, taken over by the sadness he’d heard a dozen times before, but had never really _listened_ to, not fully. He thought Allison was good, but comparatively, she was leaf cut-outs of a happy little bedtime story to his full blooded realism, and it should be jarring, and it shouldn’t work, but it did. Finally, Adam choked to a stop, arms crossed across his face, hiding, and in the absolute silence that followed, Kris couldn’t even breathe. 

Then, a bit of curiosity, trembling and fragile, caught in the throat of a mistrustful, discordant flat. Slowly, so slowly, Allison joined in, coaxing and unrelentingly joyful, and she caught up Adam’s hands, tugged him up into the sky, belting out the love of Never Land and twirling like Mira’s famous Never Silver dress, the shimmering wig made from Ever Blossoms as Allison combed her fingers through Adam’s hair. Adam resisted, half a step out of tempo and yearning with it and when they were finally matched, a wailing triumph, it was to a flying ovation.

  


[ ](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/va_bites/26230525/10998/original.jpg)

  


The dance afterward was almost a bit of a letdown. Not that he would ever say that anywhere someone could hear him, because Brad would commit physical violence if Kris suggested otherwise. The venue was great, lit up in a rainbow of colours (harvested from actual rainbows, the process of which was excruciatingly awful, he’d been informed by bitter light-talents, nursing cups of fermented joy berries like they had been places no fairy should ever be), and smothered with the decorations of all kinds of talents. Never melting snowflakes, painted flowers, synchronized dragonfly dancers.

While unofficial, the Dazzling Colours was as much a competition for the decorations as it was for the fashion; and fairies took their competition very seriously. Evidence: the battleground of hysteria wrought injuries of Pixie Tag, and the annual exercise in community pettiness fronting as teamwork and friendship of the Pixie Hollow Games. There was a line of huge, alarming dahlias looming over the clam shell punch bowls looking hungry, which had Tommy’s brand of crazed genius stamped all over. 

Anyway, the point was, the party was great; not really Kris’ thing because Katy said he was a lump of funless coal, but was really just an intense inability to handle a lot of close, sustained personal contact. The party was great, but after the concert it was kind of lackluster, which was potentially a good thing, because going back to the inability to handle huge amounts of other fairies’ raging personalities, he was feeling drained and overexposed, skin pulled tight like a sun burn. 

Katy gave him a dirty look over the lip of her punch cup, but Kris shamelessly fled to sit on top of one of the drooping tulips ringing the dance floor, packed so full of light until you could see all the individual veins in the petals. Adam tracked him down a couple minutes later, looking flush with victory and potentially a generous helping of joy-berry juice. He sprawled out next to Kris, taking up all the space in that unconsciously greedy way of a fairy who recognizes personal space up until it becomes an obstacle. 

“That was amazing,” Kris started with, after a minute where Adam said nothing, but was obviously chock full of energy waiting to burst into a conversation anyway. 

“You think?” Adam waggled his eyebrows, because he was a ridiculous fairy. Being an expert Brad wrangler, Kris recognized needy compliment fishing when he heard it so he said, “Well no...” just to see the way Adam’s face pinched in that irritated plans-foiled kind of way. 

“Of course it was. You were great. Don’t be dumb.” 

“I was wasn’t I?” Adam crowed with laughter and stretched out and almost fell off the tulip bulb, and it probably had nothing to do with Kris at all but still made him smile all the same. 

“Truly stunning. Miraculous even. We can never be friends now, you know that right? I am no longer worthy.” He meant it as a joke, but the way Adam’s smile dropped right off his face was almost arctic and threatened a champion level pout. Kris backtracked. “Hey, I’m kidding. Want some punch?” he added, to stymie what looked to be the makings of a truly regrettable tantrum. 

Adam hummed a non-committal noise and thought for a moment. “I want to dance,” he announced in a magnanimous, forgive-the-peasants tone of voice. He grabbed Kris’ hand and tugged him into the air to join the other twirling party goers, cheerfully ignoring Kris’ protests. 

“I’m good here - - no, Adam wait - - I’m a terrible dancer!” but he was laughing, and he knew when he was beat.

“Learn quickly!”

Adam was nice enough to set them up in a slow, simple two step, while Allison and Brad zoomed by in a waltz, mostly being obnoxious as they one-upped all the other dancers with their spirited and marginally more dangerous than normal air acrobatics. “You don’t have to be that good,” Adam said kindly, looking a little alarmed as he pulled Kris in and planted a possessive hand on his back, just under his aft wings. 

“I’m going to step on your toes,” Kris threatened glumly. 

“Go ahead!” Adam said cheerfully, with the confidence of a fairy who’d won his battle prize. He knew an empty threat when he heard one. 

The orchestra was playing something jaunty, so Adam sent them into a spin, tugging Kris along like a helpless, mildly bemused doll, before he leapt in to the truly humiliating conversational gambits. “You look nice. Brad?” Adam said to Kris’ immediate and unrelenting scowl. “He’s never going to let you live this down.”

“That’s what _I_ said!” which pulled a joyous little smile from Adam. 

Adam was unrelentingly complimentary, and eloquent enough that Kris was blushing, mortified, by the end of it. He could see his pink glow reflected in Adam’s eyes. Adam, who smelled nice, which was a weird thing to notice, probably. Adam, who Kris always forgot just how big he was. One hand huge on Kris’ back, totally engulfing Kris’ fingers with the other, his snake-vine hugs like they’d break his spine, how he could hook his chin on the top of Kris’ head standing on flat ground, which was deeply crushing in a hilarious kind of way. It was nice though, and Kris was glad he’d been dragged out to this. 

Allison demanded a dance afterward, and snatched Adam up at a vulnerable moment where he was left unguarded by the snack tables. Katy snagged Kris after that for a slow relaxing twirl while Adam and Allison busted an elaborate move somewhere visible to an audience. 

“That was a nice thing you did,” Katy said vaguely. She smelled nice too, but a little cloying with a flowery perfume.

“What is?” Kris asked into the crown of her hair. 

She shrugged, brushing her bangs out of her face to lay her head on his shoulder, yawning. It was getting pretty late, but there was only the judging and awards ceremony left and then the fireworks. “Getting all dressed up. He knows how much you hate it.” 

“You didn’t give me much of a choice,” Kris pointed out with a small laugh. 

“Oh, whatever, like you’d have done it if you absolutely didn’t want to.” 

“I can absolutely tell you that I absolutely didn’t want to.”

“You’re such a liar,” Katy said. “But it meant a lot to him. He was super nervous.”

“He was?” Kris asked, latching onto the important part of that sentence to get away from the horrible guilt of the rest of it. He would not feel bad that he didn’t let Brad dress him up. He would not. “Why? He’s so good. It’s all Allison’s been talking about.”

“And you’re wondering why he’d be worried?” 

Point. A lot of high expectations could have come crashing down in flames today. “He never said anything,” he said, feeling petulant.

“Why would he? You’re his best friend, he wanted to impress you.”

Even the pleasure of being Adam’s self professed best friend couldn’t stop Kris from frowning over at where Adam was conducting court with a bunch of ice-talents, looking so perfectly at ease under the scrutiny it was hard to believe he wasn’t always that confident. That probably meant Kris was a terrible friend for not noticing, which was worryingly possible. 

Soon enough, a summoner-talent hollered through a birch tube horn to get their attention, and everyone gathered around the stage to watch the judging, which involved probably more hair pulling than was strictly necessary, but was a tradition and entertaining nonetheless. The finalists ended up being (unsurprisingly) Brad and Allison, and Cassidy and Alisan, who was wearing a stunning purple number that gave Brad a run for his money. Adam snatched up Kris’ hand, visibly torn between who he wanted to win, having become bosom buddies with both Alisan and Cassidy some time inexplicably in the near past.

In the end, though, Brad won, because of course he would, the way this night was going. Alisan and Allison hugged it out under a brilliant firework display, and Brad and Cassidy exchanged snide pleasantries and good-for-you-s and can’t-wait-for-next-year-s, and it was a kind of perfect, how the evening ended with them all flying back to Home Tree in a pack, looking up at the bright wash of stars in the sky. 

Which made it all the worse the day Brad lost his talent.

\---

As the weeks went by after the festival, Never Land experienced one minor rockslide, one avalanche, and one windstorm so powerful it knocked down a bunch of palm trees along the coast. A bit of rain now and then to keep the plants alive and help out the water-talents was one thing, but before the storm that heralded Adam’s Arrival, there hadn’t been anything major in decades. Never Land hated bad weather as much as the fairies. It was making everyone nervous. 

It wouldn’t have bothered Kris so much (he was never outside as much as a nature-talent), but Kris was trying this thing where he was a better friend, where he spent a lot of time not being late for his and Adam’s standing lunch date, or going and watching Adam practice, or showing him around all the best places in Never Land, from the point of view of someone who fixes a lot of really great things and remembers them for later. 

He even fixed up an old Clumsy watch for that express purpose (which a bunch of scrap-metal-collecting-talents had been unreasonably horrible about), since Adam had a flawless measure of time and Kris, sadly, did not. Cale thought it was all hilarious, but had also extracted promises for Walnut Ball, because he knew when his territory was being encroached on, whatever that meant. 

Katy was a little frosty about it, but she’d been trying to get him to be on time for years. So to prevent the inevitable debilitating guilt of disappointing her further, he resolved to be extra nice whenever she baked for him, and to always try her experiments, even though that scared him. Katy was a great baker, no doubt, but even experiments could go wrong. Also, he made her a new pan out of a bit of metal he found down at the cove, covered in sand and a grouchy hermit crab; it was Clumsy metal, obviously, but he didn’t know what kind, only that nothing stuck to it, and was perfect for gooey-toffee pudding. 

“You are such a kiss up,” she told him when he gave it to her, “I’m on to you,” but the kiss on his cheek was the shape of forgiveness, so that’s all that mattered. 

When the next thunderstorm hit, worse than the last save for the lack of the panicked element of an Arrival, it was to a Pixie Hollow crackling with tension. He’d overheard a couple of water-talents on his way to the Tearoom, furiously complaining about the storm-talents not doing their job and how useless it was to have power over the weather if they weren’t going to use it. But that was just flaring tempers, and rude besides, and three days holed up in Home Tree was getting to everyone, so Kris just ignored them and carried on. 

He spent the majority of his time working on some of his side projects in his room, painstakingly hiding the present he was making for Adam _from_ Adam who had installed himself on Kris’ soapbox bed two days in and was staring forlornly out the window at the roving sheets of rain. 

“I want to go outside,” he whined, flopping all over the place on top of Kris’ blankets and being piteous. 

“No one’s stopping you,” Kris reminded him. “Fair warning, you’re on your own. I’m not coming after you.”

“Liar,” Adam pronounced, which, why was everyone calling Kris a liar lately. It was very rude. “I’m your favourite.”

“Not if you try and drown yourself you’re not,” Kris said, fairly reasonably, he thought. “I draw the line at self-destructive behavior.”

Adam grinned over the top of the pilfered pillow bunched up in his arms, while Kris tapped out a couple dents in a ladle handle, and ignored him with the righteous indignation of one who doesn’t expect his bluff to be called. Adam fell asleep soon after, lulled by the soft pattering on the window, and Kris switched to re-assembling a broken teapot, thinking about how close the autumn change of season was getting and the preparations he should maybe get started on, and hoping that someone had taken the time to talk to Adam about who would and would not be going to the mainland, because if he certainly didn’t want to be the one to crash down all of Adam’s prospective dreams.

Later, when he was putting his tools away in his well-worn walnut trunk, a furious bolt of lightning crashed down, bleaching his room and so powerful it cracked the air even before the shuddering boom of thunder knocked one of the locks off the wall. Heart pounding, Kris glided over to the window, but couldn’t see anything through the gloom and rain, and just hoped that nobody had been hurt. 

“You throwing things?” Adam murmured from the bed.

“Yup.” Kris tugged firmly on the window handle, to make sure it was secure, and then flew over to the bed, kicking off the shoes Brad had begged him for literal years to throw into a fire as he went. He crawled in and strong-armed a blearily awake Adam into surrendering some of the blanket he was hoarding, and poked his cold toes shamelessly into all the warm and vulnerable parts Adam left undefended until he yelped and unrolled further. “Move over.”

“Brat,” Adam snarled, which led to a ferocious battle for the pillows that devolved into petty hair pulling and kicking, because of course it did, what was he even expecting. 

Finally, fed up and the woken up kind of irritated, Adam did some kind of fancy wrangling move and clamped around Kris, who had eaten his belligerence muffin this morning and refused to admit defeat until it became apparent he’d lose a wing if he didn’t. 

“Let go. I hate you,” Kris said, laughing and prying at Adam’s arms around his waist, to which Adam said, “No, shhhh,” and doubled his weight at seeming will as he started snoring obnoxiously in Kris’ ear. 

Luckily, the next morning, it was only faintly drizzling; Adam’s cabin fever was reaching a concentrated potency, and Kris was ready to drown him in a puddle if forced into continued exposure. The storm flooded Havendish Stream, to the apparent delight of the water-talents and the absolute hissing hatred of literally everyone else. Adam had gone to get them breakfast and Kris had booked it to his workshop to get started on the looming backlog three days out of work had piled up. He was just getting into the meat of a broken weaver-talents loom when Adam came storming back, disheveled and a little crazed around the eyes, wings vibrating so frantically they were almost at a standstill.

“What?” Kris put down his hammer, because that was a look of disaster. 

“Emergency.”

“Did you break Tommy’s favourite brush?” because a new garden-talent had done that once, and it had been a time of great despair. “Wait - - do I need my tools!?” but Adam had already grabbed him and was hustling out of Tinker’s Nook and back toward Home Tree, frantic and shoving him in the direction of Brad’s shop. 

“Oh wow,” Kris muttered, stopping in the doorway, Adam hiding behind his shoulder. 

“Fix it?” Adam hissed into his ear.

“Fix what?” Kris hissed back. 

“Have you come to mock?” Brad demanded, from where he was recovering in his dandelion chair in a wasting heroine fashion, being doted on by Alisan and Allison. He had a pair of pinking shears in his hand but seemed to lack the energy to throw them. 

“I guess so,” Kris said. “Are we mocking the decor? Because I could mock that.” 

“You have absolutely no room to talk at all,” Brad hiccupped, but Kris knew a reluctant laugh when he heard it. 

Brad’s shop was a ferocious mess, like yesterday’s storm had taken up thread and needle, and in the inevitable disastrous aftermath, had thrown a tantrum and trashed the place. Tables were overturned, there were dozens of bits of weirdly shaped pieces of fabric Kris couldn’t name the body part of, and there were a number of horrifically ugly dresses propped up in the corner Katy was unsuccessfully trying to organize.

“Brad lost his talent,” Allison cooed, petting Brad’s hair as Kris and Adam flew into the room. Kris flinched, whole body revolting against the idea, and then stared determinedly through the window because Brad’s snarl had turned vicious and consuming. “We’re trying to be supportive.”

“I have _not!_ You are all _terrible friends!_ ” Brad shrieked, shooting into the air, glow bursting a furiously violent red. Cassidy, from where he was picking gingerly through a series of mangled rolls of silk, held up one of the ugly dresses and said, “Hun, come on,” not unkindly. 

Brad went abruptly pale and swayed in the air and collapsed back onto his chair and into Allison’s arms. 

“I _have_! I’ve lost my talent!” he wailed into his hands. “I can’t even tell what’s wrong with your clothes, Kris! What’s _wrong with me_.”

It descended into muted hysteria after that; Adam pulled Kris out of the room, closing the door to muffle Brad’s sobs. “ _Can_ you fix it?”

“Fix what?” Kris repeated, alarmed. “I fix things, not fairies. I’m not sure what people have been telling you, but there is a very large difference.” 

Losing a talent was very rare. It wasn’t unheard of, though. A tinker’s fixed pan would turn cake into cheese, or a light-talent would burn her hands collecting dusk, or a measuring-talent would forget all his numbers. It was generally a precursor to dying of disbelief; if there wasn’t enough faith to keep a fairy alive there certainly wasn’t enough to keep him in his talent. 

“What do we do?” Adam asked, when Kris said this, sounding cored out and small like he never was, terrified as he tightened his hand in the hem of Kris’ shirt.

“I don’t - -” Kris started, because he didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t a broken spindle, or a dented pot, or a cracked plate, which Kris was good at, which Kris could handle. And Kris was a good tinker, but in this he faltered. He didn’t know how to fix this.

“Let’s go talk to Mother Dove,” he decided quietly, because she would know what to do. Mother Dove was the very heart of Never Land, she knew everything that was everything. With a flash of terrible-child guilt he realized he hadn’t gone to see her in months. 

“I haven’t met her,” Adam admitted while they flew, which was actually so shocking Kris stumbled to a halt mid-air, and then went tumbling into a patch of crab grass when Adam crashed into him. 

“You haven’t met Mother Dove yet?” Kris asked, aghast, as Adam tugged him back up into the air. All new Arrivals met Mother Dove. It was practically mandatory. 

“I tried!” Adam said, instantly defensive. “Three times! Allison even came with me, but all the animal-talents said she was busy and couldn’t see me so I gave up.” 

“Oh,” Kris said, and then hastily backtracked at the mutinous look on Adam’s face. “Well, now’s a good a time as any, I guess.”

It was kind of telling he’d be proven wrong immediately upon arrival at Mother Dove’s hawthorn tree, which was windswept and sad looking. Kris figured some tree-tenders would have made the rounds already, but it was still pretty early in the morning. He stopped flying when he spotted something strange in the grass. 

“Archie!” he yelled when he parsed the shape, putting on speed and zooming over to where Archie was sprawled in the grass, unconscious and bleeding from a cut to the forehead, soaking wet, his skin cold to the touch. He was breathing, but shallowly. “He’s alive! Adam, go get help. There should be a couple of nurse-talents in the Tearoom. Hey, hey, Archie. C’mon. Wake up.”

“Kris,” Adam called. What was he still doing here? “You need to come look at this.” 

“Archie needs help.” 

“No, really.” Kris pursed his lips, but Adam sounded a little freaked out, so Kris gently set Archie back down and flew up to join him. When he saw what Adam was pointing at, he felt the bottom of his stomach drop out, immediately nauseous with that cold, watery mouth feeling.

“Pirates.” There were at least a dozen footprints around the tree, and now that he’d seen it, the damage to the tree was the results of giant pillaging hands, the scrapes on the bark were wounds from swords. 

“What are they doing this far from their inland?” Adam asked, but the flash feeling of deep horrible dread had already settled in Kris’ stomach. 

They shot into the tree canopy, and it was awful. Mother Dove’s nest was in shambles, the wrecks of hundreds of carefully tended flowers ripped and strewn over the bark. There were two more animal-talents unconscious and draped out on branches, and Mother Dover herself had been flung from her nest; the unnatural angle of her wing building in Kris a wretched kind of fury. 

“Her egg’s gone,” Kris said weakly, and he probably would have fallen out of the air if not for the hot brand of Adam’s hand around his bicep. “Why would they take that - - why?”

Mother Dove’s egg kept the Pixie Dust Tree flowing, and Peter Pan and his Lost Boys children, Hook and his pirates from growing old. Without it - - Kris didn’t even know what. It would be bad.

Mother Dove moaned, and Kris dove into action, frantic with it. 

“I’m here, Mother Dove, we’re here,” Kris said, kneeling next to her head and gently stroking her beak with shaking hands as Adam set down next to him, rubbing Kris’ back. One of her great eyes opened and rolled around to look at them. 

“Hello Kris.” She said, her voice a sandy croak. “Adam?” 

“Uh, hi, Mother Dove.” Adam fidgeted, looking out of place and unhappy about it. 

“It’s very nice to meet you.” She nudged his knee with her beak. “I’m sorry that it wasn’t sooner. You sang so beautifully during the festival, I was very proud.”

“I’m glad you liked it,” he said, a little bewildered, relaxing out of whatever kind of personal failing he’d convinced himself of and abruptly confident, as all fairies were that first time meeting Mother Dove, just how much she loved them. He ducked his head, shy like Kris had never seen before and hadn’t actually thought possible until right that minute. 

“What happened, Mother Dove?” Kris asked, stroking a hand down her beak and imagining all the ways Kris could feed the pirates to the ticking crocodile, or to the mermaids, of maybe even the huge octopus he sometimes saw when he was out at the coast, with only its huge bulbous eye bobbing above the water. In that instant, Kris hated them more than he had ever hated anything else in his life. He wanted them to burn. 

Heaving a terrible, agonized breath she said, “They took my egg.” A fat, pearly tear rolled down her dirty, feathered cheek. “We are in terrible danger.”

\---

“So,” Adam let go of the fern leaf and sat back on his heels. “How dangerous is this plan?”

Kris considered. “More than stealing a mermaid’s comb,” he decided. “Less than waking up a hibernating bear. Maybe.” Adam hummed and tapped out a nervous pattern on his knee. 

In the immediate aftermath of the discovery, they’d sent a revived animal-talent to retrieve the king, who had put them all in lockdown to presumably smother the rampant hysteria likely to follow. Fairies were kind of instantly contrary, though, and it wasn’t hard to escape from a giant tree that was mostly guarded by the honour system. Kris couldn’t just sit around and do nothing while the pirates did horrible things to Mother Dove’s egg, and there was no leaving Adam behind, so there they were.

The Jolly Roger was anchored right in the middle of Pirate Cove, its sails furled and masts skeletal in the light of sunset, the crew lumbering across the decks like ants, for all they were mountains to fairies. Getting on board wouldn’t be too hard; the pirates were still Clumsies, after all, and a fairy that couldn’t out-fly a Clumsy was a sad excuse indeed, but they needed to stay hidden if they were to get into Captain Hook’s cabin unnoticed. 

“Okay,” Kris whispered, abruptly contemplating the accuracy of all the stories of Clumsy hearing being super sharp, like bats, as he adjusted the strap of the sack he’d snagged from a inattentive animal-talent collecting acorns. “We’ll fly over right when the sun hits the horizon, the light reflecting off the water should keep us from being too visible.”

“If we go one at a time, we’ll be less easy to spot. I’ll go first,” Adam said. He pointed toward the stern of the ship, with the golden metalwork curling around a wall of windows. “I’ll meet you there. That’s Hook’s room right?”

“Looks pretentious enough - - I mean, yeah, I think so,” Kris muttered. He snatched Adam’s hand when he stood up, tensing to fly. “Don’t get caught.” 

“You too,” Adam said, squeezing his fingers, and then he was gone. 

\---

It took approximately half an eternity to count to one hundred, and he lost sight of Adam around twenty, his glow swallowed up in the sparkle of the water from how low he was flying. 

Compared to the harrowing ordeal of catching Adam’s Arrival feather, the flight to the ship was simple. The ocean was calm, and the pirates didn’t seem to be on the lookout for potential intruders, which spoke to how little they thought of fairies as a threat and made Kris inexplicably furious.

There was a tense moment where a wobbling pirate with a big jiggling belly in a striped shirt almost caught sight of him peeking up over a railing, but he was polishing a pair of magnifying lenses and didn’t notice Kris’ panicked dash to the back of the ship, squinting as he was. Adam was waiting, and pulled him into a lush red cabin through an open window: they laid in the windowsill for a while, gasping for breath.

“I didn’t know pirates came that big,” Kris said, gulping. Adam laughed. 

On top of a heavy oak table in the middle of the room was Mother Dove’s egg, trapped in a metal and glass box with a peaked roof like a house, a large ring on top. There was a golden lock the size of Kris’ head on the flap. The egg itself – creamy white with golden speckles – was nestled in a pillow of red velvet inside, hopefully being kept warm enough. 

“Break the glass?” Adam asked, pressing his hands along the sides and looking around the cabin for something heavy. There was nothing small enough for them to lift that would work; Kris wished he’d spent more time figuring out the mechanisms in his locks back at Home Tree. 

“How much dust do you have? Maybe we can fly the whole thing out.” Kris had a couple of grains, enough for the egg, not the whole container. Adam shook his head and said, chagrined, “I forgot my bag.”

Stymied, they darted around the room looking for the key, rooting through stacks of paper and desk drawers. There was a huge chest with a keyhole Kris could stick his head through, but there was nothing inside save for big, round bits of gold, and some colourful gems. Boring. There was a huge bed on one side of the room that was squishy, and which they spent a couple minutes bouncing on, but there wasn’t a key under the mountainous pillows, or in any of the drawers underneath. Nothing in the pockets of the ruffled coat hanging off the shoulder of a huge, wing-backed chair either. 

He did find a long silver thorn, the width of his thumb and as long as his arm, topped with a bright blue jewel, stuck into the breast flap of the coat. He thought it might work for prying open the lock from the inside. He was wrong, but it was neat looking, and in a brief fit of pettiness, Kris decided to keep it. 

“What if we push it off the table?” Adam asked, back on the table and starting to look agitated from their rousing lack of success. Kris put a hand on his shoulder but felt anxious himself. How much time until Hook came back?

“It might break the egg,” Kris said, and Adam hissed in aggravation. He flew up and started pulling on the pins in the hinge, feet against the glass and wings beating the air, which miraculously looked like it was working, creeping up bit by bit as the muscles in Adam’s arms flexed. Kris put his thorn through his belt and darted in to help, and they almost had the first hinge undone when the scrape of a key in a lock sounded from the monstrous cabin door. 

Adam grabbed Kris’ hand and hauled him over to a wall mounted skull. It had jaw gaping in a rictus grin, teeth as tall as Kris. They hid in one of the eye sockets, and had just enough time to clamp down on their glows before Captain Hook stormed in followed by the big, round pirate. Kris ducked down, afraid. Hook was enormous, filled with a volatile energy, stalking around the room like a predator. 

“Where are they?!” Hook demanded, slamming his hook into the table; it made a horrible squealing noise as he dragged it through the wood, leaving a ragged furrow. “Mister Smee, this is _unacceptable!_ ”

“Aye, aye Cap’n,” said Mister Smee, pulling his hat off his head and wringing it nervously between his hands, as if to choke it. “I’m - - I’m sure they’ll be here soon, Cap’n.”Close enough to feel the breath on his face, Adam shot a look at Kris and mouthed _who?_ Kris shook his head. 

Hook looked as if he was winding himself up for a tantrum. Kris had a sudden idea to find Peter Pan – he’d keep the pirates busy for at least a little while – but was derailed when the air above the table pinched and folded in on itself, going dark like it was pulling in all shadows in the room. The candles around the cabin flickered, a couple went out. 

The creature that appeared then was as tall as three fairies, with spindly legs and arms, its whole body like one great knot of gnarled vines, fleshy and brittle in patches. Its back was to Kris and Adam, with stumps jutting out from it like the rotted off branches of fallen trees. Kris wouldn’t be able to explain, if pressed, but he was suddenly afraid. Mister Smee yelped and crammed his hat back on his head. Hook’s expression turned victorious, then sneering. 

“You’re late,” he announced, and the creature raised its arms, as if to say _what can you do?_

“We are never late,” it said. When it moved, it sounded like bark splitting, its voice like the howling wind. Hook looked a little uncomfortable, rolling his mustache between his thumb and forefinger like he - - wasn’t quite aware that something was wrong, no, but getting there. “We arrive precisely when we mean to.”

Kris thought it should be like watching a tree talk. It wasn’t; it felt like root rot, like horrible Clumsy oil spreading thick and slippery over his hands, poison. “Do you have our gift?” it asked, and Adam clasped at Kris’ hand; they clung to each other, shaking, taken hostage by some invisible terror. “Our treasure?”

“I believe the important question is—do you have my treasure?” Hook threaded the barb of his hook through the ring of the egg’s cage and lifted it into the air, away. “What we agreed upon.”

“But of course,” it hissed, like cracks of fire eating through wood. It spread its hands and at once appeared a roll of paper, brittle at the edges and tied with a red string, almost twice as long as its body. “We are—honourable in our dealings. For you, a map—may the greatest treasures find their way into your hold.”

“Ah, splendid.” Hook snatched it up, shoving it at Mister Smee to authenticate, who, after a brief struggle with the tie and a blustering fumble unrolling the paper, gave it a passing evaluation. Apparently satisfied, Hook fetched a small golden key from the inner pocket of his ruffled doublet, and unlocked the cage. 

“Kris,” Adam hissed, snagging his attention, frantic. “We have to grab the egg before he gives it to that thing.”

They had seconds; Adam helped Kris unfurl the netting he’d brought, stringing it between them like he’d seen light-talents do to catch flying glow moss. Kris gave Adam his remaining grains of dust, and slipped the thorn from his belt; it was sharp and might be useful. Hook had the egg in his hand; it was now or never. And - - they probably would have made it, panic giving them the kind of fast-flying burst they needed, Kris could have reached out and touched the shell, he was that close. 

They probably would have made it, but then there was a hand around his ankle, darting in like a snake and tugging him out of the air, slamming him into the table, his thorn skittering out of view across the smooth oak table. Adam went tumbling across the room, torn off course by the net in his hands until he hit the wall and slid down to the floor, disappearing behind the desk.

Dazed, the room spinning, Kris flopped into his belly. He tried to gather the wherewithal to fly, get in the air; he was defenseless just lying there. But he didn’t get very far before he was flipped over, his wings crushed against the wood, with a foot pressing down on his neck.

Kris gasped.

Its eyes were black, perfectly round like rain drops. All of its teeth were like spikes. “Looking for this?” it said, and in its hands was Mother Dove’s egg. Kris reached for it reflexively, but it just ground its heel harder down on his throat. 

“That’s ours,” he wheezed, clawing at its ankle, which was covered in moss and soft like rotting wood. Captain Hook was shouting in the background, and Mister Smee was wailing - - where was Adam? But all Kris paid attention to was its slick hiss, “Not anymore,” before it was gone, blinking out of existence just as quickly as it had appeared.

Kris choked and coughed and spat up bile and heaved for breath. And later he will be so grateful for Adam, for his friendship and his strength and his courage, because he wouldn’t have made it out of that cabin without him, shaking as hard as he was, curled up on his side and so scared he was dizzy with it. 

Hook was reaching for him, he’ll remember that, a sneer on his face because there were no singular fairies, not to him, just the forever hated pets of Peter Pan. He’ll remember that and he’ll remember hands under his arms, dragging him into the air, relentless and barreling for the open window swinging shut like the future of Pixie Hollow they just let slip through their fingers.

  


[ ](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/va_bites/26230525/11029/original.jpg)

  


\---

Kris was mostly fine by the time they got back to Home Tree, but Adam held his hand anyway, with a look on his face like he thought Kris would disappear as well. They flew together in silence, sick with knowledge. 

“What do we do?” Adam asked as he led them to a deserted Tearoom, which was dark, all the lanterns snuffed. He looked at Kris, expectant, like Kris knew what he was doing, like he had all the answers. What could he say to that? What could he do? You need magic to fix magic. Kris was silent and after a long moment Adam said, “We need to talk to the king. He needs to know.”

“About what?” asked King Simon, appearing out of nowhere. Maybe that was his talent. Kris, who had been hovering exhausted above a chair, fell into it with a yelp. They turned as one toward him, and Kris felt the immediate and overwhelming urge to flee, trapped under the ruinous look of rage on the king’s face. “Know that you directly disobeyed me? Know that you’ve antagonized the pirates? I’d ask what you were thinking, but it is clear to me you weren’t.”

“We went after Mother Dove’s egg!” Adam protested at once, setting down behind Kris’ chair and putting his hands on Kris’ shoulders in a fit of solidarity, like he was trying to intimidate _the king_ , who said, unperturbed, “I’m aware.”

“It’s gone,” Kris said quietly, looking down at his hands and wishing he could fix this. There was a long minute of silence, and then the king sighed and sank down into another chair. 

“What happened?” he asked, taking off his crown and placing it on the table, sounding so weary it hurt. 

“There was a creature,” Kris started, and never before had he wished so hard to be a story-teller, to shape his thoughts in gold. “It was very tall, and thin, like it was made of rotting roots. It had black eyes, and sharp teeth. It took the egg, and gave them a treasure map. It… appeared out of nowhere, and disappeared just as quickly. Like smoke.”

The king was silent, and then he sighed, sounding exhausted. 

“You know what it was?” Adam asked. “Tell us.”

“A pixie, I believe. You are aware that the fairies were not the first to claim Never Land as their home.” 

“Didn’t they all leave though?” Kris asked, because he’d heard all the stories. “The volcano erupted, and it killed their magic. They went to the mainland, and the Pixie Dust tree was named in homage.” 

“It erupted because they tried to steal from Never Land,” King Simon corrected, which is not something Kris had ever heard about. Today was just rife with new discoveries. He looked at Adam, who looked shocked. “And they very nearly succeeded. Once, Mother Dove was not the source of magic for this place. Never Land had a heart, and it burned away with the eruption of the volcano.”

“It killed itself to kick them out,” Adam translated, getting to the meat of it. “And they’re bitter about it. And they’re trying again?”

“I don’t know. They were long before our time.” King Simon admitted, looking irritated. “We only have a scant handful of records left from their migration. We don’t know what they were planning on doing with the power as it was, but without Mother Dove’s magic, we no longer fly, the pirates grow old, the trees die. It’s possible they are trying to regain what they lost. But I fear that’s simply speculation.”

“Why go to the pirates, though?” Kris asked, because he still couldn’t understand that. Be as angry as you like, but what kind of magical creature signed on with a Clumsy? Especially a pirate. “It just, popped out of nowhere. What use is Hook? Couldn’t they just take it themselves?”

“No,” the king said, looking absolutely confident that this was the case. “There are protections in place. Never Land doesn’t want them here, and so they will not be.”

“But they can be on the Jolly Roger,” Kris said.

“Is a ship at sea ever truly the province of one harbor?” 

“But why help them?” Adam asked. “They’re only hurting themselves. They’ll grow old. They’ll die.”

“Don’t you find it strange?” The king stood then, retrieving his crown and apparently diving into unhelpful rhetoric. “That the pirates have not tried to steal her egg before today? They’ve never been aware of its importance. They aren’t aware now. They’ve signed away all our lives for a bit of gold.” 

“What do we do?” Kris asked.

Once, when Kris had been a brand new fairy, an Arrival fresh of the laugh with that new fairy smell, there had been a tinker. Kris hadn’t known him very well, only as a fixture of Tinker’s Nook, someone quiet and kind and wholly unnoticeable until he wasn’t there at all. 

“We fight,” King Simon said, with the same look of quiet grief that had been on Fairy Mary’s face when she’d said, _died of Disbelief_.

They were sent to their rooms after that. Adam stayed with Kris, which probably should have gotten more of a protest out of their guard-talent escort, but they all looked about as shocked stupid as Kris felt, and didn’t seem to care; their world was ending. Why should they?

“What’s the plan?” Adam asked, voice a whisper as the door was closed behind them. He was perched delicately on the edge of Kris’ bed, hands curled into claws on his thighs and looking ready to scratch someone’s eyes out.

 _What makes you think I know?_ Kris wanted to ask, but it was kind of true. He had a name now, a starting point, and wasn’t that the crux of it? This wasn’t about magic anymore. The pixies wanted Mother Dove’s egg for a reason, a physical, touchable reason. Why go to all the trouble otherwise. So they must have stashed it somewhere they could utilize its power, and theoretically where a discerning fairy could fly to and liberate. This was something he could fix. 

“Come on,” Kris said, jimmying the window. 

There were very few fairies Kris knew who might know where the pixies lived. It wasn’t hard getting the information out of her. 

“Are they the ones?” Lane asked, trailing off, once they’d snuck into her room and woke her up and dodged the flurry of pebbles she threw at them in reactionary fury. After they explained what they were after, her eyes had gone hard and furious, and reminded Kris of the pixie so abruptly that it scared him. 

“Yeah,” Kris said, a little breathless, “But look, you can’t tell anyone. I mean, I have a plan. But if the king finds out.”

“No, I get it,” she said, and smuggled them into the library. 

None of Lane’s fellow scribe-talents were awake, fortunately; they kept horrendous hours at the best of times and lived down here like moles, squinting at the print of their books through water drop glasses. The library itself was a big hollowed out boulder wrapped up in Home Tree’s roots, to protect it from the rain. Kris had been down here exactly once, investigating a rumour of a book with instructions on constructing a flying wagon. It hadn’t panned out, but it had yielded a set of new and exciting load bearing pulley systems for cargos larger than thirty pebbles. 

It was a neat place to visit; the lamps along the wall all lit up with glow moss and casting a soft yellow light along the dozens of rows of stacks, and so quiet you could hear the soft breath of their wings unsettling the dust on the shelves. 

Lane took them all the way to the very back, where all the oldest books were stored (besides the scribe-talents, the story-tellers were the only ones with access to all the really old stories; Kris wouldn’t even know where to start). She pulled one out and handed it to Kris, saying, “Careful,” like he wasn’t very aware of how brittle the pages were. 

She led them to a cozy nook, with big plush chairs and a sturdy table, and helped Kris flip through the pages to somewhere in the middle. It smelled like loam, as musty and comforting as Adam’s hand on his back, relentless and there. Alisan tapped on a picture. 

“This is the only story I know about the pixies,” she said, thumbing the pictures, faded and chipping. There was the volcano erupting, and there was the migration out of Never land, and later on the birth of the first fairy, riding in on a laugh. “Here,” she said, directing them to the most important bits, tapping at the last section of a poem. 

_“‘West were the dragon teeth grow,’”_ Adam sang under his breath, a haunting little tune as he scrunched his nose and translated. _“‘Deep underground where the metal snakes howl, follow the rose to find the place where the pixies prowl.’”_ Adam frowned. “There are dragons on the mainland?”

“Is that what it says?” Kris asked; it was very old dialect. He couldn’t read it very well. 

Lane shrugged. “Your grammar is awful but if we’re strictly talking about straight up information, you’re fine. Can - - Can you use it?” The first time Kris met Lane, it was during a paint war, as the leader of the scribe-talents, barking out orders and only taken down in the last quarter, merciless even as she fell. She was fierce and entirely competent and she sounded scared, now, a little like all her hopes were on a tinker and a singer and a plan that wasn’t much more than a chance.

“It shouldn’t be too hard,” Kris said, striving for confidence. “Not many roses grown underground.”

\---

Pixie Hollow was quiet the next morning, a tacked on kind of despair Kris felt creep through him like hoarfrost. There was a collective hysterical meltdown when the Pixie Dust Tree ran dry but Kris avoided it, head down, caught up in the plans he was keeping from the greedy eyes of the scout-talents, making hasty trips back and forth to Fairy Mary’s personal workshop to hide all the supplies he was gathering, and by the time dusk rolled around, he was strung out on the kind of low grade fear of discovery that was exhausting.

“Hey,” Adam said, when he got there that night, setting down the double leaf bag of pixie dust Kris had sent him to steal from Dust Mill storage, and tugging Kris up into a hug. “You’re shaking.”

He was. That was embarrassing. _What if this doesn’t work?_ he wanted to say, and _We’ve never been to the mainland,_ and _What are we thinking?_ He should have thought this through. Brought along someone who’d actually been there, who knew what they were getting in to. But they didn’t have time, Kris knew. Because if King Simon found out about what they were planning, he’d have them locked up, with a fashionable guard of Kris and Adam’s friends. He was preparing for war, which was stupid. Fairies didn’t know how to fight. They’d all be slaughtered. 

“I’m just,” Kris started, swallowing down how bad an idea this was as he ducked under Adam’s arms and went to collect the compass he’d borrowed from Tinker Bell. “Really excited.” 

“Liar,” Adam said, but he did it with a smile and didn’t call him out any more than that. 

They waited until the middle of the night, and they were almost discovered by Fairy Mary doing inventory when they tried to sneak their bags of pumpernickel muffins and sundry snacks into one of the balloons. They had to hide out in the basket for almost an hour before she flew off, Adam wrapped around Kris and muffling laughter into his shoulder. 

“You’re so bad at this,” Kris said, because he was. Adam just laughed harder. 

Once they’d gotten the rest of their stuff in the balloons – food, water, dust (that was really important), a lantern, a telescope, the compass – they sat in the basket and Kris wondered at the enormity what they were about to do. Then Adam flew up and dusted the balloon, tugged out the knot of the anchor rope, and away they went. 

“I hope this works,” Kris said, angling them west. 

“It will.”

\---

The ocean was a lot more enormous than Kris had previously given credit for. He lived on an island, but it was different out over open water, Never Land disappearing into the horizon and a fathomless pit of darkness roiling on beneath them. Kris had a sick moment of curiosity wondering what it would be like to jump out of the balloon and fall into the water, how far he’d sink before he drowned, if he’d even get halfway to the bottom. 

“I wonder what’s down there,” he said, chin on his crossed arms and looking down at it all, feeling a little dizzy. 

“Water fairies,” Adam said at once, joining him. “Like how mermaids are like water Clumsies.” Kris thought about fairies just like him, expect with a fish tail instead of wings, or fish tails for wings. He wondered what their talents would be; seaweed-bow-tying, he decided. 

“Instead of Home Tree they have Home Coral.”

“Do you think they’d need dust?” Adam asked, laying his cheek down on his arm and looking at Kris, all his attention on the way Kris shrugged; Adam was kind of intense sometimes.

“Maybe magic sand. They wouldn’t need it to fly. Just magic.” That seemed unfair, but then Kris couldn’t imagine not having the run of the sky, being stuck under all that water. 

“They’d have to be able to swim pretty fast,” Adam said, and then added when Kris looked at him. “Sharks.”

“Can you imagine?” Kris asked, laughing despite himself. “I would drop dead. Just, it wouldn’t even need to eat me; I think my heart would just give out.” 

“I’d pee my pants,” Adam agreed, which led to a discussion on what kind of clothes they’d wear (fish scales?) and what they’d eat (seaweed?) and were they’d do their business (ew).

He fell asleep soon after that, curled up under a blanket with Adam, who took first watch to make sure they didn’t go off course and in possession of some kind of magical staying power and not exhausted out of his mind like a reasonable fairy would be. 

Kris woke up at dawn to Adam rationing out slices of huckleberry pie, carefully wrapped in soft leaves. They ate in silence, and Kris cleaned up after Adam went to sleep, and when he settled back against the rudder, looking out over thousands of wing beats of nothing, came to the abrupt realization that while as theoretically heroic and brave and exciting as this journey was going to be, he hadn’t planned for it to be so _murderously boring_ , and he had nothing to do but watch the horizon not change. 

“Big, bad heroes,” he muttered, and adjusted their trajectory.

\---

It took about two days before they got to the mainland, and luckily there was only one session of rain they had to worry about in the in between (Adam hadn’t brought any extra clothes, and while Kris hadn’t really done that either, he had packed bad weather gear, and when Kris had given him one of his ugly tinker ponchos, Adam had said, quietly horrified, “Brad would be so mad,” to which Kris answered, “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”)

It was coming up on dawn of the third day when they spotted it. 

“Okay, so not actually dragon teeth,” said Adam, because he had been reasonably worried about that.

“This is suddenly so much harder than I thought it would be,” said Kris, clinging to the edge of the basket and hoping that he was hallucinating.

The sun hadn’t quite crested the horizon yet, but the sky was already stained orange and pink and yellow, and the Clumsy city it revealed was all of those as well as grey, and burning where the light hit the glass of the mountainous Clumsy houses, hundreds of them jutting up into the sky and taller than every tree Kris had seen combined. 

They floated past an island where a giant green Clumsy lady stood by herself, a spiky hat on her head and holding up a candle, and Kris wondered why Clumsies were so _weird_.

“Maybe the pirates are super small Clumsies,” Adam said, sounding breathless and a little alarmed even once they discovered that the huge green lady was a fake. They tied up their balloon to a little alcove underneath the pedestal of her candle where it would be kept safe out of the rain and wind. 

Kris didn’t know if he could handle Clumsies any bigger than that so instead he focused on filling up his pouch with dust, sprinkling some on himself and then on Adam. They had about ten cupfuls left, enough for the journey back and four days of hard flying (five if they were frugal) since they hadn’t used any on themselves during the journey. 

\---

It turned out that the pirates were normal sized. This place just had a _lot_ of them and needed to accommodate. 

The sun had risen by the time they flew in close enough to truly take in the measure of their giant houses, and there were hundreds of them scurrying around on the ground, getting in and out of roaring monsters and riding around on two wheeled carts, wearing soulless and unsaturated and uncomfortable looking clothes. Some of them had metal bits pinned to their faces, and others had elaborate paintings on their skin, and even stranger were the ones that carried around small, stylized dogs in their bags. They only had one incident where Adam nearly got hit by one of the screaming, yellow, metal monsters, and Kris sank into terrified pettiness and wouldn’t let him get near the furious congestion again.

It was like an ant hill or a beehive only monstrously enormous and complicated looking. Also, it smelled bad. 

The first day was kind of a bust. Adam kept getting distracted by the various noises and sights and smells of the frenzied diversity, and since Kris had no idea where they’d start looking for giant metal snakes (he’d thought this part would be the easiest, honestly) he didn’t put up much of a fuss when Adam dragged him away to admire all the colourless shops of strangely shaped clothes Brad would commit actual bloodshed to get his hands on. They rode around on the brim of a Clumsy man’s big white hat for a good hour before they started getting sideways looks from a group with colourful paint on their faces and striking eyelashes in fairy-tall heels. 

Being mostly overwhelmed by it all, Kris kind of thought it would have been harder to hide from how many eyes there were, since he thought they kind of stood out like a couple of sprinting thistles in a bed of baby’s breath. But nobody seemed to notice anything unusual, caught up with little white stems in their ears and pairs of round black glass over their eyes. Granted, there were a couple of them that had elaborate hats with things that looked like fairies and tiny Clumsies with feathery wings riding around in the ribbons, so maybe they weren’t that out of place. 

In any given social situation, Kris knew almost everyone in a room, by name if not by reputation. He had his friends and they had their friends, and sometimes he only knew a fairy by their face. But there were only about two thousand fairies in Pixie Hollow, and in that first day on the mainland, Kris saw almost ten times that number of Clumsies. 

“I never really believed them before,” Kris admitted, plucking off a drupelet of a raspberry they’d snatched from a stall topped high with food enough to feed all of Pixie Hollow for six months. He took a delicate bite resigning himself to a mess. They were bigger than any of the ones on Never Land, but they tasted bland. “Just how many of them there are.”

“This is just one city,” Adam agreed, which was kind of horrifying. They were sitting in the well of a red and white cloth overhang, and Adam was lying on his belly poking his head out over the edge watching a handful of Clumsies dance below them, fascinated with how they could contort their bodies. “I wonder how many there are.”

“Too many. Hey,” Kris said. He threw a drupelet at Adam. “Eat something.” 

Adam caught it, but forgot about it almost instantly, bopping his head and flapping his wings along to their strange, relentless sounding music. It pounded like a heartbeat and the singing-talents in their black boxes screeched and caterwauled and made a confusing racket. 

“Cheer up,” Adam said, “This is the only time we’ll ever see the mainland, enjoy it while it lasts,” sounding bitter toward the end. So they had told him who did and did not get to make the change of seasons trip. 

“We’re on a mission,” Kris reminded him. He kept imagining what King Simon was up to, and always came away from it panicky. 

“He’s not going to drum up a trained armada any faster if we take a day to look around,” Adam said reasonably, apparently reading Kris’ mind. 

“You have obviously not been spending any extended time around King Simon,” Kris said. 

Adam looked back at Kris and scowled. “They have enough dust stored up for at least a month. I was the one who broke into the mill, remember, they’ll be fine.” 

“You’ll be fine,” Kris said, petulant and nonsensical and realizing it. Adam made a scrunched up face and slid down to sit next to him.

“What’s up with you?” 

“Clumsies scare me,” Kris said, although he felt weird about admitting it, the general consensus being that Clumsies were fairly useless and bumbling. Just don’t let them catch you. “I just, I want to find Mother Dove’s egg and I want to go home. It’s too noisy, it smells, I don’t like it.”

“This is a once in a lifetime chance for us,” Adam said, and he looked so miserable about it, Kris felt awful. Kris had never wanted to go to the mainland, he was reliably boring like that, but he’d always kind of thought Adam was destined for greater things than the Pixie Hollow choir. “Can’t we explore for a little longer? We’ll start looking tomorrow. I’ll be the first one up, I promise.”

“Can we go somewhere quieter at least?” Kris gave in, because he was getting a head ache, and he had a character flaw that couldn’t deny Adam anything. The grin Adam showered him with was bright and excited and soft enough to pillow his head. 

\---

They found a shop that smelled like the Tearoom, and in the immediate aftermath of taking his eyes off Adam for two seconds, he found himself holding a teacup Adam had snatched from a store that sold tiny Clumsy furniture and scary dead-eyed dolls. It was full to the brim with chamomile siphoned from an inattentive Clumsy’s paper cup, and Kris almost cried mortifying tears of relief when he took that first hot, calming sip. 

“You are magnificent,” Kris said, covetous. Adam grinned around stuffing his face with a crisp blueberry nearly the size of his hedgehog spiked head and said, “See? It’s not too bad.”

They spent a ridiculous amount of time stealing different cups of tea from Clumsies in carefully lopsided hats and colourful scarves and framed glass lenses that didn’t seem to magnify anything at all (what use were they then, Kris wondered), because for all that Clumsies were weird and huge and, well – clumsy; they were apparently creative too, and there were just so many flavours! 

Some of them tasted strange and too sweet and Kris couldn’t identify the leaves, and when Kris sat in the rafters and eavesdropped on the orders, he came back with names like licorice and mango passion fruit and super Irish breakfast. There were a couple of misfires with what he later discovered was coffee, which Kris bitterly hated and Adam took too like he’d rather be breathing it than air. It kept him stupidly wired for the rest of the day, wings beating too fast and eyes too big like they couldn’t take in enough of the flashing lights and thrumming crowds fast enough.

They did hit upon a moving yellow mountain full of Clumsy children, and snuck in through an open window to entertain them; it couldn’t hurt, their belief is what kept the collective fairy community alive, after all. One little girl with a big halo of black hair and little pink shoes just clearing the edge of the seat, let Kris sit on her shoulder and play with her curls. She whispered at him how much she loved fairies while Adam sang to a group in the back curled around him protectively while the Clumsy adult hawked around up front. 

“Clap if you believe,” he whispered to her, clapping his own hands. She did, and when Kris gestured to Adam and got him darting in between all the seats, the rest of them started in as well. The adult at the front looked irritated with all the noise, but Kris could feel a swell of magic blooming right near his belly button, soft and warm, and when they darted out the window, Adam hooting laughter and glowing bright like a star, it felt worth it.

\--- 

Deciding there was nothing for it besides a furious tension headache, Kris relaxed and started to enjoy the adventure. They’d spent most of the afternoon not getting caught, after all, and despite himself he was feeling a little invincible. 

“Look!” said Adam holding up something pink and white. It looked like a set of pointy teeth. “It’s squishy!”

It was indeed squishy. “What’s it for?”

“Necklace? Hat?” Adam said, trying to string it around his neck. Kris looked out from between the jars of cookies they were hiding behind to collect behavioural cues from the assorted Clumsies milling between the shelves below and amassing bits of brightly coloured gummies in little water-clear bags. A couple of furtive ones near the back of the shop were popping some in their great gaping mouths while the adults weren’t looking. 

“I think you eat them,” Kris said, turning back. Adam took a bite and noticeably couldn’t decide on what face to make. He settled on baffled. “How does it taste?”

“Like glue,” Adam said, wings beating a little anxiously. “But sweet.”

“That’s alarming,” Kris noted, and dragged him off to investigate what looked like a Clumsy library. It smelled wonderfully familiar, musty and quiet, with only the shop keeper and two quietly murmuring customers. There was the added bonus of a surprise shop cat, which caught sight of them with its beady green eyes and visibly debated whether or not it wanted to abandon its petting perch to give chase. Then a customer scritched it under its chin and it dismissed them as inconsequential. 

They couldn’t read any of the books, of course; Clumsy writing was a collection of unfathomable scribbles, but they did have big glossy pictures and pages that took both of them a great deal of cooperative effort to turn. Most of it was abstract, incomprehensible, places they would never visit and constructs they’d never see, but it was fun to look at. 

“I think Lane would like this place,” Adam said, finding a pile of small books about as tall as his waist, and flipping through the pages thoughtfully. “Or Alisan. Imagine the stories she’d tell.”

Dusk fell in between Adam finding them a solitary Clumsy music-talent playing a mournful tune on a violin and the towering poles all along the stone path flaring to life like stars. Instead of starting the fly back to the green lady and the balloon for some well needed rest, Adam dragged him around in the dark, entranced with the hundreds of brightly coloured lights flashing on the sides of the looming houses. It was all very disorienting to Kris, but Adam looked like he was having the time of his life and Kris didn’t want to make him stop smiling. In a surprising turn of events, it was much easier to hide their glows than it had been during the day. 

Clumsies didn’t have to sleep, apparently, because it was just as busy that night as it was at the height of noon; at least that was the impression Kris got after Adam smuggled them into a dark pit of a place playing scaldingly loud music, drums as colossal and booming as a dragon’s howl. There were hoards of Clumsies, jumping around and flailing their arms and tangled up in each other, all while a machine on an upraised stage made fog and a spinning lantern on the ceiling shined rainbows of light down on their sweating faces. 

“Maybe we should go!” Kris shouted, but Adam was clear across the room already, investigating a long counter a large crowd of Clumsies were crowded around, holding up pieces of square green paper and getting drinks in return. They couldn’t try to get any; the Clumsies behind the counter were watching the grabbing hands of the patrons like wolves. 

Adam did find them a group of Clumsies in the back, sprawled in a cozy circle around a table littered with glass bottles and little cups almost as tall as Kris. They were inhaling the smoke of burning twigs and were collectively glassy-eyed, and they all appeared to believe they were hallucinating when Adam got too close and they spotted him. 

“Hey, little bro,” one Clumsy said when Adam landed on the table and made a mildly distressed face at how his boots stuck to it, and added, “Hey, second angry looking little bro,” when Kris, agonizing over having such an impulsive friend, joined him. He offered the burning stick to Adam, but Kris was already feeling a little lightheaded, and didn’t let him take it. 

“What is this place?” Adam yelled at them, but one of the women burst into giggles and stroked the air above their wings and said something like, “Perfect little bells,” through a pretty impressive slur. 

“I don’t think they can understand us,” Kris said. He wasn’t very surprised, their adults weren’t nearly as magical as the children. 

“That’s too bad,” Adam said. 

“They kill bugs for art,” Kris reminded him. 

They hid under the table when a harassed looking serving-talent stalked up and set down a tray of assorted colourful looking liquids in funny shaped glasses, not nearly as dazed looking as the rest and dangerous because of it. The man with the burning stick slurped back two of the small glasses and turned them over so Kris and Adam could sit on them, and asked them lots of questions like _is flying fun_ (yes) and _do you live in shoes_ (no, well not Kris or Adam) and _you know any nutcrackers?_ (what?) 

Finally another man cleared a section of the table and poured out some sugar the more lucid Clumsies got interested in. They didn’t eat it like a rational fairy would have, or stir it into tea; instead they snorted it up their noses with bits of rolled up paper, which was kind of disquieting. Then they leaned back and abandoned whatever amount of coherency they might have had. Adam stalked around the piles in a circle but thankfully didn’t do anything stupid like _try any_.

  


[ ](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/va_bites/26230525/11423/original.jpg)

  


“Clumsies are weird,” Adam pronounced, and Kris, perched on his glass seat, wondered how nobody had noticed them yet. Even without the glow of magic, Adam was radiant, the white of his rose petal vest shining a strange kind of blue light.

Trying to be a little more adventurous, Kris did take a sip from one of the little cups (“Careful little bro, just a little.”). It tasted like bog water and hit like a punch to the face and was so unexpected Kris stumbled back and fell on his butt, collapsing in an abrupt cloud of pixie dust which an daring woman slid a finger through to taste. 

“I’m flying!” she shouted after a minute, flinging out her arms and slumping into someone’s lap. She wasn’t, of course, that hadn’t been nearly enough of a dose to lift a Clumsy, although she seemed to be thinking happy enough thoughts to compensate. It was funny to watch though.

“ _Can_ we make them fly?” Adam asked. 

“I will never speak to you again,” Kris promised, because he wouldn’t, and Adam looked put out for a minute before he was distracted by one of the Clumsies and the piece of glass she pulled out of her pocket to show him. It lit up like a star and when she pointed it at them, it made a shuttering noise. She frowned, but there was nothing on it but a bright flare of light. 

“I think we should go,” Kris said through a yawn sometime later, jumping off one Clumsy’s shoulder and gliding back down to the table where it was stickier but didn’t smell as cloying. He was a little dizzy and his throat hurt and his ears were pounding and he was uncomfortably tacky and if he had to stay here any longer he was going to abandon Adam to the mercies of the Clumsy mew-sum, so help him. But when he turned to Adam he found him perched on the edge of the table, watching a couple of Clumsies tasting each others’ mouths. They were really going for it, Kris could see their tongues. 

“What are they doing?” Kris muttered; he didn’t ever think Clumsies would ever be anything but incomprehensible to him. Were they trying to eat each other?

“Not sure” Adam said absently, but it kind of sounded like he wasn’t telling the whole truth, and he had a strange expression on his face when he looked back at Kris. 

\---

It took way longer than was reasonable to get back to the balloon. 

“I think that was poison they were drinking,” Kris complained when they got there, flopping to the floor of the basket and reeling a little from how the world was spinning, and then turning onto his stomach to keep from crushing his wings. 

“Fun though,” Adam said. He took a sip of water from one of the elephant leaf pouches and then handed it to Kris, who drank from it greedily. Kris rationed out some peach jerky and some flower flour flatbread, and nibbled at it absently. “Where should we start tomorrow?”

“Underground?” Kris said, sitting down next to him and tugging the blanket from where they’d stuffed it into a bag that morning. “There can’t be that many places a giant metal snake can hide, not in a city full of Clumsies.” 

He was very, very wrong about that, it turned out. There were at least a dozen holes along _one_ of the long stone roads of the city, and they all funneled underground into a large circular tube that paralleled the surface. It was overwhelmingly filthy and smelly and Kris gave it up for a lost cause the second time a surprise flood nearly drowned them both. As far as hiding places, it was probably their best bet, but there was no way roses were growing down there. 

“We could try to find some mole holes,” Adam said, although he didn’t sound very confident. 

They ended up flying right to the top of the highest Clumsy house they could find in order to get some perspective, the wind vicious and stinging and ripping at the hem of their clothes, the chaotic sprawl of the city brutally intimidating. 

They’re more dangerous than anyone knows, Kris thought, measuring out all the ways nature had ceded to the spread of Clumsy ingenuity, parceled away to their monoliths, their sheer numbers like a cloud on the wind, spreading out and conquering like algae, sucking up all the air. It left a cold taste in his mouth, which morphed into acute nausea once they wasted a good chunk of the day flying to the edge of the city, looking for wilderness and finding none, just endless thousands of wing beats of soaring dragon teeth and the chaotic howl of these giants’ seething existence. Kris panicked over that, feeling every wing beat of separation from here to Never Land and shaky with how much time they were wasting. 

Adam, proving his inestimable worth as a friend and adventurer, just sat Kris down in a window box between a copse of pink petunias drooping in the cloggy summer heat, and went to pilfer a couple of cherries from a Clumsy stall, glistening red and dangling in an unsupervised bushel. The street below was packed with Clumsies, talking and laughing and going about the grand scope of their day not so different from fairies. It was very loud here, a relentless kind of alertness. 

“This isn’t looking good,” he said, once Adam got back with his pilfered treasure. It was cool in his hands despite the heat, refreshingly sweet against his tongue. 

“Not really,” Adam admitted, peeling off a bit of skin and taking a bite. He was hunched over his spread legs as an exquisitely fussy preventative measure against stains. “Could be worse.”

“How do you figure?” Kris asked, because at this rate Never Land would disappear beneath the waves before they managed to explore a sliver of this place. 

“We could be back helping Brad pretend he hasn’t lost his talent,” Adam said without looking up from his cherry save for when Kris burst out laughing and jostled loose a reserved of water caught in the crook of a leaf and plastered his hair to his head. 

“Well it’s an improvement,” Adam said, rounding out a laugh of his own, and then shrieking violence when Kris went for his own hair, and in some cosmic twist of fate, it wasn’t until Kris was breathless with laughter, wrenched out of his worry and caught in a headlock that he saw it. 

“Wait - - Look,” Kris gasped.

“Like I’m falling for that,” Adam grunted, and Kris rolled his eyes and speared his thumb into the soft tender bit of Adam’s belly, right beneath the rib. “Ow, you troll!”

“No seriously,” Kris ducked under his arms and flew out of the box. “What do you see?”

“Clumsies?” Adam said as he joined Kris, and then he frowned. “Where are they going?”

“Time to find out,” Kris said, feeling something like hope clatter up the ladder of his ribs. 

There was a certain tidal surge to the crowds of Clumsies, a brief moment of tranquility where only a handful of them were roaming along the upraised little stone paths bracketing the larger one, before dozens of them would appear; sprouting like rye grass, pushing and shoving and packed together fit to burst. He’d thought they’d all come on the large metal monster carts which would pull up to the side, lights flashing, spilling its harried cargo with a hiss and a general air of irritation. But there was no metal cart, and the Clumsies were pouring out of a hole in the ground, a staircase fenced in on three sides with a dozen different colours of Clumsy writing, pictures of women and funny shaped bottles. He didn’t know how he’d missed it before. 

It was much harder getting down there without being spotted. Clumsies didn’t look up, as a general rule, stuck on the ground as they were and without the threat of hawks overhead. But the ceiling underground was much lower, and Adam and Kris were stark against the overwhelming greyness of it all. They hid in the light fixtures, which were hot and dusty and smelled like burning leaves, and waited until they were sure no one was looking. 

They followed the mill past a short fence of revolving prongs until the white walls opened out onto a cavernous, dirty platform. 

“Looks like a dragon den,” Adam had enough time to say before a cool voice announced the arrival of the 3:45 to Chamber Street, and with a whoosh of air that very nearly displaced them both from the metal light casing they were sitting on, roared in a great metal snake, screeching to a halt and spilling out Clumsies. 

“I think we found it,” Kris said weakly. 

\---

They decided to wait until night to explore further, and flew back to the balloon for a rest; there was too much of a risk of being seen. Once there, they ate a big meal – poppy puff rolls, water chestnuts, dried mushroom caps and mouse cheese – took a nap and by the time dusk had settled, they were kitted out with full pouches of pixie dust, birch bark tube lanterns full of harvested noontime sun, and shoulder bags full of fruit jerky and water for when they got hungry. 

“Before I forget,” Adam said, handing Kris a long package wrapped in sage leaves Kris had seen earlier but hadn’t given much thought over. “I picked it up before we escaped, I thought it might be useful and I didn’t want Hook to have it.”

It was the thorn Kris had stolen from Hook’s jacket, polished and sparkling. “Thought you might like to stick it somewhere soft if you had a chance,” Adam said nervously, after a long minute of silence. 

“It’s great,” Kris said with a quiet, breathless grin as he slid it into his belt. “You’re great.”

It was a little harder to retrace their flight in the dark, but they managed to find the staircase without too much difficulty. The platform was mostly deserted, with only one faintly dirty Clumsy man sleeping on a bench pushed up against the faded white wall. 

“Alright,” Adam said, rubbing his hands together and then planting them on his hips, striking a pose because he was actually very ridiculous. “Let’s find us some roses.” 

It was slow going. Every couple of minutes the snake would return with a fresh flood of Clumsies to pour out onto the platform and disrupt their search. An hour into it, Adam was getting frustrated; he’d started throwing pebbles down on their heads from the safety of the light. They couldn’t have hurt, being as small as they were, but a number of them would look around, irritated. 

“Not helping,” Kris said absently.

“I disagree,” Adam snarled, chucking another. “I feel much better.” 

There was a lot of trash, but no roses. A quick backtrack and more thorough search of the entrance yielded nothing, and the more bitter part of Kris wondered if Clumsies were even capable of growing them. They were fussy and high-strung and vain and a disaster to work with even if you had the ability to talk them down from pathological root distress.

“Let’s try another platform,” Kris said, flying back outside. They had to fly pretty high, but now that he knew what to look for, it was fairly easy to find another. 

There wasn’t anything at the second one, or in the third. There were maps along the wall dotting potential areas of interest, but there were dozens of them, and Kris didn’t know if he had that kind of patience on hand to spare. 

They caught a break at the fourth station. The metal snake was roaring away on its track when Kris spotted a little painted leaf curled around the edge of the platform. Once it was safe to fly, they dropped down to the ground.

“Sometimes I think this is all a giant joke and I’ll wake up and none of this will be real,” Kris said, immediately feeling stupid that they were looking for a _real_ underground flower in a dirty Clumsy city as he ran his hand along the neatly painted rose brushed against the wall, the gentle slope of sun warm petals. It was definitely the one they were looking for, magic in a way flowers weren’t, here on the mainland, a little empty, a little lost. When Kris touched it, the dust on his fingers lit up the thorny stem and a glittering trail zipped off into the monstrous black tunnel along the wall. 

“Clap if you believe,” Adam said, sounding vaguely horrified, and off they flew. 

\---

Being caught in a dark space with a giant howling metal beast was about as immediately terrible as it sounded, and they had to crouch down and cling to each other with each one that passed, tearing the air into a wind tunnel as its wheels screeching and squealed and kicked up sparks like concentrated thunderclouds. The first one caught them off guard with how powerful it was and Adam nearly got turned into fairy jam when he nearly got sucked under the wheels. They have to walk after that. 

“I am going to have so many nightmares. _So many nightmares_.” Adam shrieked, flirting with hysteria, fingers like claws digging into Kris’ back.

“Get in line,” Kris yelled, pressing Adam closer against the wall as the wind tore at his clothes like fish hooks. 

As a comparison to the truly weird things Kris has counted as life experiences, a sudden fall through a hole in the wall a few minutes later shouldn’t be as surprising as it was. For a wildly disorienting minute he thought they were dead, sucked under the snake and primed to be crushed, and he spared a brief second’s thought for how no one back home would know what happened to them before all his attention was commandeered by a plummet into the dark abyss. 

The next thing he knew he was awake – miraculously in possession of all his limbs and potentially a heart murmur – was being crowded by six bearded faces, lit up in warm yellows with big glass-shiny eyes and tall pointy hats and wide button noses. Kris had to admit, this was a new one.

“Fly with you,” he said at once, having been instilled with an unrelenting Katy shaped courtesy that brokered no exceptions. He sat up and flapped his wings, checking for damage. 

“What use is flying to us, ay?” said one with a red hat. He had a dozen wooden buttons woven through his beard and threaded through the curlicues of his thin brown mustache. Kris sat up and eyed them. They were taller than Kris and quite wide, but from the standpoint of someone especially aware of how short he was in comparison to others, Kris speculated at least a quarter of the height was hat. Gnomes, he guessed. “Why you down here little flying man, ay? Ay?”

“Where’s my friend?” Kris asked, looking around. He couldn’t see past the press of round bellies, the patchwork cloth of their overalls. 

“Sleeping,” said another gnome with a green hat, beads in his beard. “You flying men sleep a lot, ay? Lazy.”

“We got knocked out,” Kris protested, but Green Hat threw his stout arms in the air and grunted something in rumbling gnomeish that Kris translated as insulting. 

“Your lazy friend is here,” Buttons said, and they parted to reveal Adam, conked out and lying on his side on a crackling bed of straw, looking for all purposes to be asleep. Kris got to his feet and flew over, and patted Adam’s pale, freckled cheek; there was an angry red bump on his forehead. “Hey, Adam. Wake up.”

“Morning beautiful,” Adam groaned, scrunching up his face as his eyes flick open, out of synch like a chameleon, and then abruptly flying open when Kris goosed his nose. “Hey! Ow!”

“Come on lazy,” Kris said, ignoring his sputtering. “Rise and shine and whatever.”

"Where are we?” Adam asked groggily, sitting up with the help of an arm under his shoulders. Kris smoothed out his wings, which batted gently against his hand and didn’t look damaged. 

Buttons made a show of looking around, at the dirt walls and the connecting tunnels and the little metal candle holders pinned to the walls in the room, the stout table at the side and a handful of clay pots stacked up next to it. “Give you three guesses, ay?” 

Kris rolled his eyes. “Are we underneath the metal snake?” He clarified, listening for the roar and hearing nothing.

“The train? Nah,” said a third gnome, blue hat and feathers. He snapped the straps of his rough weave overalls and patted his belly. “This is a rest station, ay? Found you sleepin’ in one o’ the tunnels and brought you here. These run under all New York. Lucky we found you before the rats.” 

“Rats?” Adam asked, immediately alarmed, while Kris contemplated _New York_. The only rats Kris had ever encountered were scavengers from the Jolly Roger; skinny, vicious things. “I hate rats.”

“Well their ain’t no butterflies and posies,” said Blue Hat, scowling above his bristle of a mustache. “What are two flying men - -”

“We’re fairies,” Adam interrupted, a severe expression on his face. 

“- - two _flying men_ doing lurking around these tunnels, it ain’t safe,” Blue Hat finished, tacking on a pointed glare. 

“We’re looking for pixies,” said Kris, helping Adam to his feet and not seeing the point in pretense. 

Green Hat, who had previous been grinning, crunching up the neat wedges of his mustache, immediately looked wary. “Pretty tall order, ay? What do you want with them, then?”

“They stole from us,” Kris said, voice dropping down into arctic. “We’re not going to let them get away with it.”

Sharing a look that made Kris’ feel like punching someone, the gnomes shuffled into a loose circle and started to mutter amongst themselves, casting calculating looks in their direction every few moments to which Adam admitted, “I feel like we’re about to be spit and eaten,” and Kris answered, “I’m sure you’ll taste great,” because he fell under two categories of personality under threat: screamingly anxious and willfully obnoxious. Adam snorted and nudged his shoulder, brushed his wings with his own in that charmingly unconscious way of his, but it wasn’t like he was much better.

“Them pixies are dangerous, ay?” said Buttons, after a long furiously muttered debate was brought to a close. He turned back to them with his fists planted firmly on his hips, puffing out his chest like a bullfrog, defensive posturing, which wasn’t necessarily effective, but a little alarming as a commentary on what they were about to face. 

“Yeah,” Kris said, feeling a massive headache building and guessing where this was going, “We know. Can you take us to them?”

“Sure we could,” said Green Hat, waddling up to the small pile of Kris and Adam’s adventuring supplies with a speculative gleam in his eye. “Depends on what’s in it for us, ay?”

Kris managed to talk them out of taking Hook’s metal thorn out of some misguided sense of nostalgia, but they didn’t have a wing to fly on from a negotiating standpoint and ended up parting with almost a full bag of dust and the rest of their supplies save a lantern before the gnomes would take them anywhere. Kris had just enough time to see the dust squirreled away into one beard or another, before they were shuffled off down a serpentine connecting tunnel, which was perfectly round save for the roof, which sloped to a point almost the exact dimensions of the gnomes’ hats. 

They followed behind Buttons with the rest of the gnomes bringing up the rear like a hairy rockslide; there was enough room to fly, but it was chokingly claustrophobic and stayed that way long enough for Kris to start getting anxious, a flood of nervous energy building up under his skin and crackling for an outlet, desperate to fly into the sky. Finally it widened into a cavernous room complete with a cart and a set of tracks perched on top of a cliff, which wasn’t a whole lot better but at least it didn’t feel like the roof was going to cave it. 

“I am suddenly no longer prepared for this,” Adam said weakly, observing how the tracks disappeared into the black hole that the little lamps dotting the entrance of the tunnel couldn’t hope to illuminate. There were pinpricks of fire out in the darkness, but it was impossible to gauge the distance; they looked like stars on a bed of midnight.

Kris looked at him, dismayed, “Remember the part where we can _fly_?” 

Adam scowled, perfectly vicious, but whatever he was about to say was nicely routed by Green Hat nabbing both of them by the forewings and dumping them in the cart, ignoring Adam’s snarled, “Hey!” with the general air of someone practiced in dealing with recalcitrance. 

“Welcome aboard! Don’t fall out ‘cause we ain’t comin’ back for you,” another gnome said – yellow hat, little bells tied to the very tips of his whiskers – climbing in after them and attached a lantern to a peg at the front. “Hold on to yer fun bags!” he shouted, and they were off before Kris could mount a protest.

  


[ ](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/va_bites/26230525/11768/original.jpg)

  


“You were right,” Kris shouted a minute later, abruptly aware of how little he cared for the constancy of which his life hurtled through such straights of peril, faster than either of them could fly combined and hanging on to the sides of the cart as they took a hairpin turn and nearly capsized.

“That is the general state of things, yes!” Adam shouted back.

Kris could fly, but the sensation of falling without any of the control was harrowing, and at one point he was fairly certain they were hanging upside down. They took screaming corners and airless drops and an eternity and half later, they came to a stop, careening up to a faintly lit and very sheer cliff edge, brakes squealing with marked protest. When they were finally at a standstill, Kris launched himself out of the cart and onto the ground with such a sweet feeling of relief he nearly lost his lunch. “I hate this place,” Kris said weakly. “Why did you bring me here?” willfully refusing involvement.

Adam sprawled out on the ground next to him, and Kris held actual hatred for how giddy he sounded, laughing like he didn’t have a care in the world. “To torment you. Is it working?” 

“I can see my insides,” Kris moaned, horrified, which snagged a companionable grunt of agreement from Adam and a loud guffaw from their guide, along with some fairly derogatory mocking to which Kris promised, “I’ll fight you,” with strong feeling. 

“Oi, little flying men,” Bells said, tone abruptly somber, grabbing their attention once they’d found their feet. “Be careful, ay? Them pixies are a dangerous lot.” 

“Is there anything you can tell us?” Kris said, leaping to his side with a glide that was only a little wobbly, feeling a fission of tension that wasn't nausea return to his belly. Adam joined him and added, “Anything at all.”

Bells considered them for a moment; he had lines around his eyes made for laughing, but he just seemed weary now. “All I can say is they didn’t cause much trouble up ‘til just recent. Kept to themselves more like and left us well enough alone. Getting real violent though lately. Been sneaking out into our tunnels and causing all sorts.”

“How long ago was that?” Kris asked. 

“Beginning o’ summer? A little earlier? Sometime ‘round there. First wind o’ them gettin’ up to any trouble at any rate. Had that nasty tree o’ theirs root up some tunnels, this is the last one left that goes anywhere near ‘em.” Bells nodded to the tunnel behind them, dark as midnight and a hundred times as ominous. “We don’t use it too much, probably why they haven’t bothered with it.”

“Beginning of summer,” Kris said, contemplating.

“Same time as my storm,” Adam said quietly; he’d taken to calling it that as a joke and it had stuck around like a rash. 

“Same time as the problems with the King’s harp,” Kris agreed. That must be when they started their attack on Never Land, trying to get to Mother Dove, nibbling at the defenses until Never Land’s magic started acting up. Why though, that was the question. “What were they like before?”

“Oh, you know, weren’t a real friendly lot,” Bells said, “But they kept to themselves, didn’t bother us and we didn’t both them. Been that way for ages and such.”

“And you have no idea why they’d be acting any different?” Adam asked.

“Nah, but I figure it can’t be anything good,” Bells said, cranking the lever at the bottom of the cart. “That’s all I’ve got in me, though, so I’ll be off. Take care.” And with that, the little cart creaked into motion and disappeared back into the darkness, only a squeal of the wheels and a bright afterimage streak of a lantern as evidence it had been there at all.

Kris turned to Adam, looking up at his face and conscious of the shadows pressing in, stymied by the faint gold glow of Adam’s skin. He felt suddenly afraid, an abrupt case of nerves like he’ll never see Adam again, which was incredibly irrational, he recognized, but nonetheless encompassing. Adam put a hand on Kris’ back, just a steady press of warmth that said _I’m listening_.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he blurted out, thinking about how solid Adam was, as a friend and fairy, big and strong and kind, soft like a natural A and reliable where Kris wasn’t, usually, compassionate where Kris was single-minded, focused on his task to the detriment of everything else. Here was Adam trying to comfort Kris and Kris didn’t even know how what Adam was feeling. If he was scared or angry or worried. He should ask. He was scared of what he's say. 

“I’m glad I’m here too. I don’t know what you’d do without me,” Adam said, and it was obviously meant as a joke, grinning that thousand star grin of his, but Kris felt it like an acorn to the head anyway.

“The scenery would be less pretty,” Kris admitted, thinking, _die probably_.

“You’re such a brat,” Adam said, shocked into a bark of a laugh and a scuffle of Kris’ perpetually volatile hair. “Let’s go liven up a place.”

Kris took point and popped out the sweet pea stopper from his light tube, blinding himself for a second before redirecting it down the tunnel, light specs dancing slipshod behind his eyes. His first year at Pixie Hollow, Kris had gotten lost down in the animal-talent tunnels, which were a veined and comprehensive underground labyrinth, hundreds of offshoots to the various burrows and dens throughout Never Land. Every animal-talent knew how to navigate them like instinct, but they were infinitely confusing to everyone else. This felt a little like that, claustrophobic, but at least there were no forks for them to argue over. Kris still felt a little lost, and the suffocating feeling of being under so much ground was horrible. 

“How are we getting out of here?” Adam asked abruptly after almost an hour. Kris dropped to the ground. “With the egg? I mean, they’re obviously going to have it guarded, and I don’t think we have enough dust to follow the tracks back.”

“I don’t know,” Kris admitted softly, feeling a little sheepish as Adam set down beside him and stared. “But they must have some way of getting out, right? He said that this was the last tunnel that connected to their home. How else do they get to the surface?”

“They teleport?” Adam said, dry as rye toast. 

“We will deal with it when we come to it,” Kris said, magnanimously, having forgotten. He wasn’t quite sure how they’d do that. Fly really fast, probably. 

“So we’re just going to wing it?” Adam asked, crossing his arms and sounding incredulous. 

“I am a tinker,” Kris sniffed, “I find a reasonable means to fix a problem and I go with it.”

“Sure, that’s it,” Adam said, wry, with a pointed roll of his eyes. “C’mon, master tinker, we have some pixies to rob.”

\---

Kris was a fairy from a magic island, so he wasn’t a stranger to the unusual, or the gentle sort of envy he associated with admiration of another talent. It was that way with Allison, or Brad, especially Adam; being able to create new things, beautiful things, right out of their imaginations. Kris could create things too, but his purpose was utilitarian: a pulley system, a wagon, a new classification of propeller. He didn’t create things for beauty. He did it because there was a need for it and he was good at providing. 

Pixie Hollow was a big place, sprawling and safe and beautiful in an effortless kind of way. Kris couldn’t say the exact dimensions of the place they came out at once they’d put the lantern away and let their eyes adjust to the darkness. It probably wasn’t as big as Never Land, even if it felt enormous, the kind of midnight black that was encompassing, like the sea, endless in all directions and smothering with how small you were in comparison, no reference cues to give you any kind of context. 

The pixies home was a strange kind of beauty, frightening. 

There was just enough hazy indigo light misting from the carpets of luminescent mushrooms to give shape to the tangled web of fleshy roots covering the ground, winding up to an enormous tree whose massive trunk was visible even from hundreds of wing beats away, and canted at an angle. It was the only spot of real light in the whole place, the crown of gnarled branches lit up with fire, maybe, or the harvested light of the Clumsies glittering signs, toxic looking and fabricated. The tree almost looked alive, but in a terrible sense, like the kind that would snatch you out of the air and eat you. 

“We are so going to get caught,” Adam whispered, but he had a smile on his face that was a little like a challenge. 

“Three weeks of buttercup pudding says we don’t,” Kris said, because he was suddenly feeling invincible again, this close to their goal, stupid as it sounded with the hardest part of their journey laid out for them like a spider's game. He liked arguing with Adam more than he liked being scared. 

They dropped down between a couple of monster mushrooms, hiding under their wide, drooping hoods and looking for evidence that they’d been spotted. The caps were covered in a sticky type of pollen, which sprinkled down on them as they waited and which clung to Kris’ pants when he tried to wipe his hands. It had the hilariously unintended side effect of turning their glows indigo and let them more easily blend into the scenery to which Kris said, “Handy,” feeling a little bemused, and Adam hummed and rubbed some into Kris’ hair. 

The trip was slow going and silent, ears pricked for the sound of movement and over-anxious reactions to anything they did hear, which wasn’t much, but made them panic anyway, and if they flew too fast, they’d leave a huge path of golden dust behind. The little bits they were leaving seemed to disappear fairly easily, just a hint of gold if you knew what to look for. But the more of it there was, the more it clumped together like wet sand and refused to sink into the ground, a huge sign of Hey Intruder.

Halfway to the tree Kris took out his thorn and held it tight in a sweaty grip, then he ripped off a piece of his shirt and wrapped it around the metal as a grip when it became too slippery. It probably wouldn’t be any use if they were swarmed, but might be useful if they just got cornered by just one or two, and however irrational it was, he felt safer with it in his hands. Like a bowl of warm soup, or soft mitten against a howling storm, a buffer.

It was the most surreal trip of Kris’ life, if he was honest. It felt a little like Pixie Tag, the hunt of it, which carried a whole host of new connotations for Kris to wrestle with, and made him never ever want to win another game of it in his life. Or was it lose? He judged it win by the small margin of _they_ were the ones doing the stalking of the pixies. It stayed that way, them creeping and sneaking like a game, until they were nearly at the base of the trunk. 

They had just hunkered down for a rest underneath the cup of a wrinkly and sagging mushroom leaning hard up against a thick root. They were trying to hammer out a plan of attack – fly right up and risk exposure? Or try and find a tunnel through the bark like in Home Tree – when two pairs of feet bounced into view, gnarled like that first one on Hook’s ship, but smoother looking, like a birch rather than an ancient, pitted oak. 

Kris’ first reaction probably saved their lives, clapping a hand over Adam’s mouth, because where Kris clamped down on his surprise, went still and silent and small like a mouse in the shadow of a hawk, Adam was a singing-talent and naturally _vocal_ , and his startled open mouth would have given them away in one perfectly sharp C. Adam pressed his own hands over Kris’, eyes wide and scared. 

The feet stopped right in front of them. Kris could have reached out and touched them, they were that close. Kris motioned for Adam to slide back, closer to the root where it was darker, better hidden. The pixies were speaking in a high-pitched chitter, something fast and incomprehensible, but with an overtone of an argument, and Kris could feel the panicked little huffs of Adam's breath against the heel of his hand, his own heart racing. 

_There_ , he mouthed to Adam, motioning with his chin to the dark round of a hole at the base of the root, mostly hidden by mulch but big enough for a pair of fairies. Adam nodded and crawled backward as quiet as he could, but they must have made some kind of sound because they had just enough time to skinny in, tuck their wings tight to their backs and huddle up in a ball before the cap of the mushroom was ripped up and away. Adam still had his hands covering Kris' over his mouth, and his eyes were squeezed shut. Kris held his own mouth to Adam's shoulder and counted to ten over and over in his head until the pixies released the cap with a soft creak and left. 

Kris waited until he couldn't hear the crunch of their footsteps, the rustle of dislodged mushrooms before he whispered "That was way too close," barely an exhale and right into Adam's ear. Adam was shaking, and for an alarming second Kris thought he was crying. "Are you _laughing?_ " he demanded when he realized, still at a whisper, but a quick glance out of the hole showed a definitively clear coast. 

"That was the scariest thing that's ever happened to me," Adam said, muffled through his hand and the cackling laughter he was trying to smother. "I thought we were gonna die."

"I will finish the job if you don't stop it," but the rush of fear was fading and Kris was smiling, a little giddy with it and hiding his own laugh in the corner of his mouth. 

Rather than sit and wait like rabbits in an open field, Kris ducked under the arm Adam had slung over his back and crawled the rest of the way into the root. It was pitch black with a mostly comforting loamy smell - save for a faintly worrying note of decay - but Kris didn't dare risk the lanterns. It wasn't too long before their little tunnel widened out into a semi spacious room, carved smooth and round faintly lit with a ceiling of pale blue luminescent moss. 

"Check it out," Adam said after a moment, palms against the wall and squinting at something when Kris turned from his casual observation of the room - there was one small tunnel to their right, twin to the one they came out of, and a larger tunnel straight ahead, big enough for a pixie and presumably the exit heading up to the trunk; they wouldn't get lost, at the very least.

"What?" he asked, gliding over. 

Adam gestured at the wall. "Tell me what this reminds you of."

Kris leaned close. There were small figures carved into the wood – burned into it, he thought, running his hand along the smooth blackened furrows. Likely made by a metal knife, stoked under a bed of coals until red hot, and then pressed into the soft wood for a lasting imprint. Kris didn't know what Adam was getting at until he spied a caricature of a volcano nearly at the ceiling, spewing lava. "This looks like the book from the library."

"I think this is their history," Adam said, fingers trailing as he made a circuit of the room. It made sense; paper in Pixie Hollow was made out of birch bark and the finely ground wood shavings collected from the carving-talents for the really important books. You needed a good deal of sun to dry the sheets flat, though, and if the pixies had been living down here all this time, they probably had to use what they had on hand. "They had wings."

They did, six in fact; fore, aft and mid. Kris remembered the protrusions on the back of the pixie on Hook's ship, how he'd thought of broken tree branches. "I wonder how they lost them."

"I wonder how they got here," Adam said, scoping out an origin point. The volcano might have been a clue, but there was no logical progression to the pictures and each carving seemed interwoven with its neighbor until it was a great jumbled mess. 

"We'd speculate a similar trail as what brought you here," came a voice from behind. Adam gasped and they both spun around. Kris brought his thorn up in defense, and then yelped and froze, the bottom dropping out of his stomach. It loomed over him, almost flush to his chest and close enough that it could reach over and rip off Kris' wings with its long spindly arms. He imagined he could feel its breath on his face; how hadn't he _heard it?_

There was a tug on his right forewing and for a horrible second he thought it was actually about to take his wings, but it was only Adam, latching on and dragging him backwards, to the safety buffer of a roomful of space. They wouldn't be able to fly past it, but it was certainly too big to fit in the small tunnel next to Adam's feet. 

"How did you find us?" Kris asked, ignoring Adam's hiss of warning. This pixie wasn't as tall as the other one, or as riotously mangled looking, and Kris' first thought was it was some new species entirely. It was scary, but the other one felt evil, some kind of monster crawling out of the shadows. This one was a predator, definitely, but no more unnatural than a cat, or a hawk.

"We watched your clumsy struggle straight from the wall," it said. "As one observes a drunken rat fall prey to the clever cat."

"We weren't that obvious," Adam protested. 

"How do does one find a star in the sky?" it said, snide, its huge black eyes glittering. "It simply looks."

"You talk funny," Adam said, in that slow deliberate way he learned from Brad, over-enunciated with a crisp top note of condescension. 

"You are puerile," it snapped back, and wow, Kris did not expect this to turn into hair pulling. 

"Okay, you found us," Kris said, cutting off whatever inflammatory remark Adam undoubtedly had rolling around in that plush mouth of his. "What now?" because of the three of them, he seemed to be the only one who remembered there was actually a situation here. He tightened his grip on his thorn. “Are you going to kill us?”

It was silent for a moment. “You shall come with us,” it said, turning to the tunnel. It paused, as if sensing their reluctance. “For we know of what you seek, and if you try to run we will hunt you down like flies.”

Kris shared a sidelong glance with Adam as he strung his thorn through his belt. _Don’t ask me,_ Adam said, silent through the line of his shrugged shoulders. They trailed, reluctant, after the pixie up through the tree, heavy hearts single file through the winding tunnels, dark and empty. He ran a hand along the hollowed wood; he wasn't a tree-tender, or a garden-talent, so he couldn't hear the whispers as they would, but he was still a fairy and sensitive to the currents of life, the soft pulse of warmth from a happiness, the cold silence and brittle nausea of the dead and dying. This wasn't any of those. This was an absence, the very opposite of touch. There was nothing here. There was no- _one_ there, and it sent a shiver down Kris' spine, tingling up the tips of his wings. He flew closer to Adam, as far from the walls as he could get.

Despite the pixie's height, its long, spindly legs, it was a snail's race traveling up the tree, and by the time they crested the trunk, Kris had worked himself up, imagining all the different scenarios they were about to fall into. He was strangely disappointed, then, to discover nothing but Mother Dove's egg waiting for them. 

"This seems too easy," he breathed to Adam. The pixie looked back at him and grinned its impressive teeth, which were less pointy than Kris was expecting, but still enormously unsettling. Kris and Adam hovered near the entrance of the tunnel, uncertain.

"We would be remiss in keeping you from your treasure," it coaxed. It opened its arms wide and bowed low, offering up the egg, which was wound up in a tangle at the center of an apex of branches. The hollow it rested in was large and a little rough, not bark, but something else. Kris wondered how it was being kept warm, then he noticed a faint light coming from underneath the bed brambles. Coals. 

Adam tugged at Kris' hand and they skirted around the pixie. They were just picking delicately away the brambles, keeping their bodies between the egg and the pixie when it spoke next.

"Now that you've been assured of its safety," and the brambles they'd managed to pick away sprung up and latched back onto the egg. One scratched up the back of Kris' hand and he jerked away with a hiss. "We believe the time is now appropriate to bargain."

"You think so, huh," Adam said, snatching Kris' hand and looking the cut over. It wasn't too bad, but it stung. "Seems like you're the only thing standing in our way from taking back _our_ egg." He was glowing a muted shade of crimson, darker than anger, frightening. He sounded much more confident than Kris felt, especially when, between one blink and the next, the pixie appeared before them, grabbed them both by the wings and flung them off the egg and onto the ground. 

"Your assumptions are misguided," it said, voice bland and grin grim as Kris and Adam scrambled to collect themselves. "Will you listen now, or must we convince you further of the fragile ice on which you stand?"

"What do you want?" Kris asked, winded. It was monstrously strong. 

"What we want is simple," it said, gesturing around. "This is our home." Then it stopped. 

"Okay?" Kris asked, but he thought he knew where this was going. "This is our egg, this is our _magic._ "

"It was needed," it said, like it was simple matter, a borrowed paint brush.

"Yeah, by _us_ ," said Adam, working himself up into a temper. "You had no right to it."

"As you have a right to the land you cull? The sun you bathe beneath. That land was ours far before your infant race ever breached its virgin shores."

"You left," Kris said, uncompromising, because the pixies of long ago had made the decisions they did, and he refused to feel guilty about it. "That's not our fault."

"What choice is there in fire?" it said simply, its rage dying away into something cold and hardened. "Our sisters and brothers starving while we searched for safe haven, our magic rotted away. And lo that we did find such a fine place, hidden beneath the senseless Clumsy noses. And lo did we lose our wings to the acid dust of this tree, as payment for the darkness we call comfort."

"Why didn't you stay?" Kris asked, curiosity getting the better of him. "Not all of Never Land burned. And Mother Dove came out of that fire. You would have had magic."

"The fire was a disease, swiftly burning and lingering in the pitted scars," it said, pacing around the perimeter of the egg, a hand prepped over the brambles. "Your Mother Dove was not born from fire but of ash long cooled. And by then Never Land was lost to us, its temper as volatile as its flame."

"Well then maybe you shouldn't have tried to steal from it," Adam said, scowling.

"We would make it _better_ ," it snarled, advancing, switching gears from carefully harmless to frightening, and Kris stepped in front of Adam, pushing them both back, like he could do anything if it decided to attack. It would tear him apart if it wanted, that much was obvious. “We would turn Never Land into a utopia.”

"Well that's not going to happen," Kris said, hovering just a little bit, so he wasn't as dwarfed by the pixie's intimidating height. "So what can we do to make this go away? You didn't bring us here to gloat. You obviously want something. What is it?"

It was silent for a long minute, its black eyes glittering. "As one might gaze upon this cursed place, one might understand the depth of its peril," it said at last. Its tone was carefully bland, carefully quiet. "We are as bound to it as you are to your own, and as it dies we are left to endless darkness," it said. "Our leader thought this egg enough to regain what was lost. But it is not. It is a weak thing made of light. Nothing more than a meager salve on a festering wound, and it has no place here."

"Then why did you _take it_? You've sentenced Never Land to _die_!" Adam demanded, pushing Kris out of the way and getting right up in the pixie's face. Quick as lightning, it backhanded Adam across the cheek and sent him sprawling, and then pinned Kris with a snarl when he tensed to fly to Adam's side, shouting his name.

"I'm fine," he groaned, rolling onto his stomach, and it wasn't very comforting.

"We do what is necessary," it said calmly, its face abruptly passive, as if this whole thing was intensely boring, staring right into Kris' eyes like it could see right to the heart of him, trap him up and strangle him with vines. "We are merciless and we are _alone_ and we will take what is needed until we are safe. We care not for the land that has forsaken us, _abandoned_ us, and your precious egg will serve its purpose long enough until we discover something hardier to takes its place. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Kris said, feeling small. He considered the hollow Mother Dove's egg rested in, how much bigger it was comparatively, the patterned ruts in the wood as if the bark had grown around something, into something, and he felt a cold rush in his stomach. "What was here before?" but he thought he already knew. 

"The mighty dragons once ruled this world," The pixie said, skirting around the egg, casual as you please, trailing its needle thin fingers along the cream white shell. "Their eggs were the sun and stars to the paltry candles of these magic tokens. We were fortunate for its presence, but a thousand years had poisoned its core and our home and thus we search for a new source of power, and so our deal is this - - if you hope to take back your egg you shall provide for us what we seek."

"A dragon egg!" Adam exclaimed. Kris chanced another glance; he had a bright red mark high up on his cheek, but his eyes were clear and angry. "Are you crazy?"

"There aren't any left," Kris said, anxious, because there weren't, because the only dragon he knew about was Kyto and he was evil, and there was no way they could get one from him even if he could lay eggs. Dragons were vicious over their hoards, and Kyto was worse than that by half, trapped up on top of Torth mountain and simmering in his rage. "We can't get you one of those."

"We do not want an egg!" the pixie snarled, and its voice was like a shrieking winter wind, a shattered pane of ice, "Are your heads full of air? Without a dragon's fire it will fester and perish, as without your mother's feathered rump this fragile thing will crumble. An egg is not what we want."

"Then what?!" Kris asked, exasperated, and he was suddenly exhausted, certain that they weren't getting out of this ahead, or even alive, if they weren't useful enough to keep that way. "What else is there?"

It smiled then, and the feeling that washed through Kris was familiar, the flash flood of predator terror, like what he felt on Hook's ship but worse with how close it was, how he hadn't recognized it, like a venus fly trap, harmless until the teeth were closing over your head. "There is but one object of sufficient power for which you will retrieve for us," it said, and Kris knew it was going to be bad even before it finished with, "A scale of a mighty dragon."

Adam was seething, his glow pulsing a bright furious red, hedging into violet, and Kris didn't know what his own glow was, other than he felt abruptly cored, nauseous with the fact that however this turned out, it wasn't going to end well for them. Adam looked ready to get into a fight, hands curled into fists and a snarl on his face. 

"Kyto is evil," Adam said at last, breaking the silence, voice hoarse. "He's bad news, he'll poison this place worse! There has to be something else."

"A dragon's choices are evil," it said with a dismissive wave of its hand. "Its body is a natural magic, untainted by morals, resonating across distances. A scale will live until the dragon dies, and if you wish your egg returned to you unharmed, you will get for us a scale from the dragon Kyto to save our home." 

"No," Kris said, surprising himself. Surprising Adam too, if the way his glow abruptly blanked out was any indicator. 

"What?" the pixie said, congenial except for how it wasn't. It was smiling again, but a shade too sharp. 

"We're not leaving without the egg," he said, and stood his ground as it slunk toward him, looming like a cobra. "It'll die. We'll get you your scale but we're taking the egg with us. We didn't come this far to go back empty handed."

"And how do you propose to take it from us, little fairy," it said, reaching for him. The needle points of its fingers skated his cheeks, not quite touching but undeniably there, a cage ready to snap shut, a breath of violence against his cheeks. Kris’ hands were shaking. "Shall you kill us and rip it from its cradle? Shall you venture out into our realm with your hard won prize, and tempt the wrath of our brethren, our blood on your hands?"

"You're honourable in your dealings, right?" Kris blurted. Out of the corner of his eye, Adam was twitching, prepping himself for action and Kris waved his fingers at him frantically, asking for trust, because this probably wasn't going to work, but he could only hope. He tightened his grip on his thorn anyway. "That's what the other one said, you're honourable, so if you make a deal with us you have to keep it, and if we deal for the egg and it dies - and it will, it won't survive long down here, you know that - if we deal and it dies you're defaulting. And you can't have that, right? So we're taking it with us."

There was a long, tense moment of silence where Kris was absolutely positive this was going to end with him being strangled. The look on its face was poisonous, like it hadn't expected Kris to know that. He could feel its breath on his face, hot and fetid. Then it smiled again. "And what assurances have we of your honour? Your word?" It sneered at him when Kris opened his mouth. "What promises can you make?"

"What do you need from us?" Kris asked, wary, because there really wasn't any way there were getting out of this without cooperation, even as Adam hissed, "Kris," sounding panicked.

The pixie's fingers traced along Kris' cheek and down his throat, feeling like the tips of blades of grass, the unexpected brush against a thread of a spiderweb, and Kris shivered, alarmed, before he could help himself. It put its face up close to his. It smelled like a still pond. 

Kris looked to the side, at Adam frozen with fear for him, as the pixie breathed on his cheek, its teeth so close to his eyes. 

"Your wings," it whispered at him, reaching one arm past his shoulder to trace the patterns in the veining. Kris kind of wanted to throw up. "We will take your wings and should the dawn of three days pass without our payment, your life will be forfeit."

"What?!" Adam shouted at once, but they didn't have a choice, did they, not if they wanted to save Never Land, get out of this wretched place and see the sun again. If they couldn't make a deal at least he could say goodbye to his friends. He found himself looking at Adam. He felt like a fast-flyer, everything slowed down to a standstill around him, everything but his racing heart, his fluttering breath. He was scared, words caught up in a bramble tangle in his throat along with all his fear. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth.

"I'll do it." Kris's eyes popped open. Adam looked stunned, like he couldn't believe he'd just said that, but as Kris watched his expression hardened, resolute. 

"No - -," Kris started, trying to stall this disaster, but the pixie was already saying, " We have a deal," and its fingers disappeared from Kris' cheeks with a paper thin slice of pain, and Kris had just enough time to inhale before Adam's wings were gone, before Adam's face was ashen, a high thready gasp on his lips.

"You have three dawns," it said, sounding almost cheerful with Adam's wings cradled in the cactus cage of its palms, one finger tipped in the red of Adam's blood. "Fair travels," and with a snap of its fingers, the pixie Home Tree disappeared around them, melting away like a mirage.

  


[ ](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/va_bites/26230525/11840/original.jpg)

  


\---

Kris fell to his knees in a copse of grass, dewy and springing up to slap him in the face. Adam and the egg landed next to him, the egg with a thump, and Adam landing harder than he should, like he was suddenly a dozen pebbles heavier. Kris sat there frozen and Adam looked like he was going to be sick.

They made a roughly woven net out of grass for the egg. The flight back to the balloon was horrible and silent, the last of the dust sprinkled over Adam and the egg to make them light enough for Kris to drag along, which took a monumental effort considering neither of them were thinking particularly happy thoughts. It was the middle of the night so they didn't have to deal with anything larger than a bat, although they had one close call with an owl that was a little like guano icing on a dirt cake.

Kris left Adam to tie down their remaining supplies and wrap up the egg while he untied the balloon and checked the tethers and used a generous helping of the last of their dust in the cotton, hands shaking. When he dropped back down into the basket, Adam's back was to him, broad and blank and wingless, and Kris made an involuntary noise, a soft thing wallowing in the back of his throat. Adam's shoulders went tense, but when he turned his face was lax, if pale, a little grey. 

"Ready to go?" he asked, and then felt stupid about it when Adam just looked at him, haggard. 

Dawn was just cresting the horizon by the time they were well and truly off. There was no Second Star to follow so Kris pointed them east and they settled in to wait. Adam was bleeding from a long cut along his right arm, from the pixie's talon, so Kris helped him wrap it. 

"I'm glad it was me," Adam said finally around noon, while Kris is checking the blankets around the egg and fussing over its temperature. Adam looked wan, like he was trying to convince himself that that's what he felt. 

"Adam..." he started, and Adam watched him with an expression on his face like he was really, truly happy that Kris wasn't the one whose life was on the line, who hadn't lost his wings to Kris' half-baked plan, but he was starting to tremble, the horror of it all catching up. Kris didn't know what to do with that kind of dedicated friendship, so he took Adam's hand and said nothing. 

\---

"Did it hurt?" he asked, hours later, needing to know. The sea air was suffocating, salty and thick on his tongue, although that might have been the guilt. 

Adam was silent for a long time before he settled on, "Yes - - no, not really." He paused. "I'm not sure how to say it - - pins and cactus needles, kind of. Like when your foot is asleep. I feel really heavy. Unbalanced," he added quietly. He glanced out at the ocean, how long a fall it was. "I'm afraid."

"I'm sorry," said Kris, wanting to say _thank you_ or _we'll get them back_ or _you shouldn't have done that for me_ , but he felt awful and the words caught in his throat, so he said nothing. 

\---

"I wonder if they were always like that," Adam piped up around dusk, while they were splitting up a poppy seed muffin and the last of the peach jerky. He sounded sad, and Kris didn't know if he could muster up that kind of compassion if he were in Adam's place. Kris certainly wasn't feeling anything positive about this whole thing. "It said their egg poisoned their tree, because it was dying."

"What does it matter? They're awful now, they took your wings," Kris said, feeling a poisonous kind of rage. Adam looked at him, eyebrows raised, and Kris looked down at his shoes. 

"I'm aware," Adam said, with a quirk to the corner of his mouth. "But they lost theirs first." He shifted around in his seat, posture accommodating limbs he didn't have. "They lost their home and they live down in the dark. I'm not excusing what they did, I just think I understand why they did it. We'd do anything for Never Land."

\---

When the Second Star winked into the sky a few hours after dark, Kris leaped to the rudder and set them on course, and then sprung to the front of the basket to sprinkle a handful of dust on the bow, most of what they had left, so the balloon zoomed off into the dark with a little extra oomph. 

He slept intermittently, too wired by half, and kept awake by how Adam tossed and turned and mumbled in his sleep, exhausted and exhausting in turns, and by the time morning rolled around Kris was faintly trembling with how tired he was. Never Land was a speck on the horizon, which should have made Kris giddy, but instead reminded him of how little time they had. It didn't get any smaller for hours, to which Adam announced it as scorned, and Kris argued that the king had asked it to run away from them as punishment. Whatever the reason, they reached the shore by mid-afternoon and were met by an escort, a bunch of familiar faces scowling. What had the king been telling them?

Kris spared a look at Adam and then flew out to meet them. "Fly with you," he called, hesitantly. 

Cale was the first one forward, zooming from the back of the pack to punch Kris in the shoulder and then catch him up in a hug. He pushed Kris back but kept his hands on Kris' shoulders. "What is wrong with you?"

"Hi, honey, I missed you too," Kris said blandly. 

"You are such a badger's backside," Cale snapped, but he was smiling. "The king was going nuts. Where have you been?"

"We went to get Mother Dove's egg back," Kris said, and he couldn't help smiling at that, a little smug, a lot relieved, and the effect was immediate, shock and then hope and then joy springing up on the faces around him. "We need some help getting it back to her, we don't have any more - -"

"Kris! Adam!" and there was Allison, shooting through the tree line like a star, hair billowing out behind her. She slammed into Kris, and she was crying, and he wrapped himself around her and pressed his face into her sweet smelling hair, and was so happy to see her safe and well he felt his own eyes start to sting. Then she pulled away and flew toward the balloon, shouting, "Adam, what are you doing over there!"

"Allison wait - -" but she was already gone, and her scream when she got to the basket was a punch right in the stomach. 

"What happened?" Cale asked, and Kris must have had a horrible look on his face, because when he turned back, Cale went white.

\---

Their entourage helped pull the balloon, which was flagging, back to Pixie Hollow. When they arrived, a couple of frantic animal-talents swooped in and snatched up the egg and disappeared like fast-flyers while some nurse-talents wrapped Kris and Adam up in blankets and shoved cups of water in their hands. It wasn't cold out, but there was a crowd of fairies staring and whispering and the way Adam huddled up under his blanket and avoiding looking at anything made Kris think it was a kindness. 

Allison parked down between them sometime after the blankets and before Brad came screaming into existence, kicking up a fuss - "Kris, you look horrible," he shouted, bursting into semi-hysterical tears - and wouldn't leave no matter how much the nurse-talents insisted. Katy flew in at one point and settled down next to Kris and didn't say much of anything as she snatched up his hand and held on. 

Finally she said, "We thought you were dead," with a carefully blank expression on her face which promised horrible things for Kris' future. 

With the sheer enormity of all the excitement, the appearance of the king was almost anticlimactic, regal as ever, but not nearly so intimidating as Kris remembered. They'd been through a lot.

"Well," said the king, and Kris couldn't parse the expression on his face, whether he was pleased at their success or angry that they'd gone behind his back. "Let's hear it."

Kris looked at Adam, who was looking at the ground and ignoring everything past the huddle radius of Brad and Allison, and stood up. The room went silent, and Kris wasn't a story-teller by any stretch of the imagination and he stumbled over details and had to backtrack a couple times and it was mostly a narrative mess, but the whole room was rapt by the time he got to the part about the gnomes, and he could admit to a bit of a thrill having that kind of captivation. 

"We had to sneak in through their Home Tree, and Mother Dove's egg was at the top. We almost got caught," Kris said, and when he looked around the room from the toadstool Alisan had sat him on, Adam was gone. Well, not gone - - he was at the back of the room, blanket still wrapped around his shoulders like it would do anything, head ducked low as he talked to Rani, the only other wingless fairy in Pixie Hollow. He had a horrible expression on his face, devastated, and Kris faltered, an abrupt pain in his chest. 

"What then?" 

Kris floundered for a second. "Then we stole it," he decided on. 

"And Adam?" the king asked quietly, and Kris wasn't stupid; Torth mountain was a forbidden place, so he said, "There was a trap," and it wasn't even a lie, not really. It had been a trap, one they'd walked into with eyes wide open. "We barely made it out. There were... consequences."

He was cornered until dinner, until dusk, celebrations breaking out as the Pixie Dust Tree started to flow again, when the fairies who had lost their talents slowly regained them. Kris watched the sun set and the stars wink in with a sublimating anxiety, their time running out. He didn't know where Adam was. 

Quarter past way too late, Kris found himself loitering outside Home Tree, looking for any sign of Adam and wondering if he should just go on without him. This was Kris' fault. He needed to fix it, and as awful as it sounded, with no wings Adam would just slow him down. 

"Where are you going?" Katy asked, appearing out of nowhere, her glow blushing anger, because she knew him better than was probably wise, and had an uncanny knack for knowing when he was about to do something stupid.

"Don't tell the king," he said at once, and then resisted smacking himself in the face, because if she was ever going to have an immediately contrary response to something he said, it would be that. "I don't have time to explain - -"

"You do if you don't want me to start screaming," she said, crossing her arms, immediately immovable. Then her entire posture changed, slumping into exhaustion. She flew up to him and put her hand on his cheek. "What is going on with you? I'm worried."

Kris scratched the back of his neck and backpedaled a wing beat. He was disappointing everyone lately. "Adam traded his wings to get the egg," Kris said at last, and Katy sucked in a shocked breath. "I have a chance to get them back but I have to get a dragon scale from Kyto."

"What? No. Kris, that's unreasonable," Katy said immediately, taking a step back like she was removing herself from the suggestion entirely. "You'll get killed. You think Adam would want you to do this? He volunteered, he knew what he was getting in to."

"You don't get it," he said, and his voice was too hoarse by half, the last two days catching up to him, the thoughts he'd been trying to ignore clamoring to the forefront. "He'll die."

"He'll be fine," Katy said kindly, putting a hand on his shoulder. She thought he was coming around. "Fairies can live without wings. Rani does. Adam will manage. And we'll be there for him."

"No," Kris whispered. His hands were shaking. "If I don't get the scale by dawn, Adam will die. That was the deal."

Katy went white. "How?"

"I don't know, some kind of magic. They're - - they're terrifying, Katy. They took Adam's blood. I think it might get them into Never Land," he said, the idea occurring to him abruptly. He tested out the shape of it and felt numb. "They can't get here normally, they need a deal, oh no, oh no, Katy - - it'll get them in, they'll take back Pixie Hollow, they - - I bet that was their plan. We won't stand a chance."

"Kris - -" Katy started. 

“They were kicked out,” Kris said. “Like, forever ago, and they live under this huge Clumsy city and their tree poisoned them and they lost their wings. They hate us, Katy, they want us to suffer.” 

She stopped and considered him, eyes too wise and too kind and too scared, and Kris imagined what the pixies would do to her, to the rest of his friends, and felt sick. "I'll keep them distracted," she said at last.

"If you see Adam, tell him to meet me down by Mermaid Lagoon," he said, and swept her up in a hug before he darted out into the darkness. 

\---

He had to keep close to the treetops to avoid the owls, but it was a full moon night so they were easy to spot, riding the sky on silent wings. Everything was cast a ghostly grey, cut with shadows until Kris was seeing faces in the waving canopies. 

He was sweaty and feeling every minute of his sleepless night in the sluggish beat of his wings by the time the tree line started to cede to charcoal mountainside. Kyto was located right near the top, tangled up in the inflammable, unbreakable roots of Never BimBim tree. Even in the dark, Kris could see how the roots chafed at Kyto's mottled scales, rubbing them raw until they’d turned into large pitted scars. It smelled like burning skin. Kris felt bad for about three seconds before Kyto opened one massive eye and pinned him with such a look of hatred Kris could feel the evil like a sour swamp wind to the face, reeking and pungent. 

"My, my," he said, his voice a deep grumble, which vibrated through the rock and made it hard to stand. "What fortunate wind has blown my way? Have you come to release me little fairy?"

"No - -"

"Then you are of no use to me, begone," Kyto slid his enormous snout back toward the wall of the cliff, a clear dismissal. Kris was losing his opportunity. 

"I've come to make a deal with you," Kris shouted, before he chickened out.

"Have you? You must be in dire straits," Kris knew when he was being made fun of. "This is amusing, what do you want, little fairy, be quick about it before I set you on fire."

There were a number of blackened char marks on the ground around his muzzle, fanned out to the edge of the cliff. Kris darted out of range, which was unfortunately closer to Kyto's flank. "I want one of your scales," he said. 

Kyto's roar of laughter shook the ground. "You don't have the currency."

Kris clenched his fists. He needed something rare, something no other dragon would have in its hoard to tempt Kyto's greed. "I - - I'll give you my wings," he decided, because if Adam could do it, so could Kris, and Kris would much rather be the one without than force Adam into it.

"I already have fairy wings," Kyto said, sounding bored and done with the conversation, and Kris remembered, too late, the story of the lost wings of Rani, how she'd sold her them for a golden comb from Kyto's hoard to appease the mermaids trying to flood Never Land. "Is that all you have to offer? If it is kindly leave. I grow tired of you."

Did it have to be a freely given scale? Kris thought desperately, eyeing Kyto's flank. Kyto can't move, he thought. He won't be able to stop me. But even as he considered it, Kyto snarled, "You cannot steal from me, little fairy, you will regret even trying."

Kris didn't know what to do. He didn't have anything else to offer. The pixies would be there at dawn and he'd lose Never Land to them and all his friends would _die_ , so he thought he could be forgiven for the terrible lapse of judgment that involved Kris brandishing his stolen thorn and shouting, "I need a scale and I'm not leaving until I get one!" which was infinitely stupid, he recognized, but desperation had a way of making you stupid.

The thorn was warm from his body, warming up even though his hands were cold from the flight. It was a comforting weight. Kyto reared back as much as his cage would allow, which admittedly wasn't much, but from the viewpoint of a fairy thousands of times smaller than him, it was terrifying. Objectively he knew that Kyto couldn't escape (but what if he could), but it was still horrible. 

"I'm not - - leaving. Never Land is in trouble. If I don't get a scale, we're all going to be in danger. I'll annoy you into giving it to me if I have to," he said. A thorn to the eye was going to hurt, no matter how big Kyto was. 

"Shut up," Kyto said, and he didn't sound angry, like Kris was expecting, but considering. "What do you have there?"

"A thorn," Kris said, confused. "It was Captain Hook's." 

"Bring it closer," Kyto ordered. 

"Is this a trick?" Kris asked, because he wouldn't put it past him.

"No."

Hesitantly, because trusting Kyto not to eat him would be a stupid mistake, Kris flew over to Kyto's massive head. He smelled worse up close and his eye was huge. He held up the thorn so that he could look at it.

  


[ ](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/va_bites/26230525/12042/original.jpg)

  


"Do you know what that is?" Kris shook his head, because apparently his initial instinct of _pirate jewelry_ wasn't correct. Kyto huffed a laugh, which was at once both condescending and nearly blew Kris off the side of the cliff. "That is a Never Wand."

"No way," Kris said, stunned. There were two types of wanded fairies that Kris knew of, the Great Wandies and the Lesser Wandies, both species of mainland fairy with the ability to grant wishes. He'd never heard of a Never Wanded fairy before. 

"They are very rare," Kyto said, and he sounded covetous. Kris could work with that. "Very rare indeed. Your species lost their wands a long time ago. There is not a dragon alive with a Never Wand." 

"Can you use it?" Kris asked. Giving a magic wand to an evil dragon seemed like a bad idea, now that he thought about it. 

"I have a dozen wands," Kyto said dismissively, and his tail appeared above his head, curled around a collection of small jeweled sticks. "They are useless to me."

"Then why do you want it?" Kris asked, because it seemed kind of stupid. 

"So no one else may have it," Kyto said, like it was really that simple. But then maybe it was. A dragon's pride was its hoard. "It's a matter of supply."

Hope was a poisonous thing, Kris was starting to realize. "Do we have a deal then? My wand for your magic scale?"

Kris could visibly see the competing urges on Kyto's face, the consuming greed for a unique treasure and the desire to screw Kris over. Eventually greed won out. "Give it here."

"You first," Kris said, because he wasn't taking any chances. Kyto snarled but shuffled around until he could reach a large claw through the roots of his cage, holding a scale that was almost as tall as Kris, diamond shaped with smooth corners. Keeping an eye out, Kris darted in and dropped the wand where Kyto could reach it, and then snatched up the scale, it was incredibly heavy, but Kris could still fly, if barely. 

"Pleasure doing business with you," said Kris, feeling a little like he was selling out. He didn't think he had to worry though, wands were notoriously picky about what wishes they granted, he knew that much, and now that he thought about it, his wand felt like it had a kind heart. He doubted Kyto could sway it. 

His arms felt like they were about to fall off by the time he got to the Lagoon, and first chance he got, he collapsed into the sand, gasping and sweaty, his arms so numb they were trembling. He blamed what happened next on that, his exhaustion, the feeling like he was about to make this right and the sheer amount of relief that entailed. He blamed it on how dark it was, and how the clouds had covered the moon, but the next thing he knew he opened his eyes and Mister Smee was standing over him, a glass lantern swooping down on him like a hawk. 

"No way," Kris said, because _no way_.

\---

The only good thing that came out of being kidnapped was that they let Kris keep the scale in the lantern with him. Whether that was purposeful as a means of keeping Kris from biting them and slowing them down in case of territorial mermaids, or because they actually didn't know what the scale was, he didn't know and he didn't particularly care. He spent the rowboat ride back to the ship throwing himself against the glass, hoping his sheer hardheadedness would free him. It mostly just gave him a headache. 

"Excellent," Hook said, once Mister Smee dropped Kris' cage down on his table, the same one the pixie from last week had almost crushed his throat on. Had it only been that long? It felt like a lifetime ago. 

Hook was curling his mustache with his hook and looked smug. Kris wanted to bite him. He didn't have time for this! Hook scowled and put his big bulbous eye up to the glass and then frowned. "This isn't the right one, Mister Smee!"

"Go away," Kris grumbled, curling up with both arms and legs around the scale like a snake-vine, feeling petulant and a little like he was hallucinating from exhaustion because he didn't think it was actually this possible to be this unlucky. 

"Bu-bu-bu-bu-but, Cap’n, it's wearing green - -"

"It is not female! This is unacceptable!" Hook roared, but he turned on Kris anyway and picked up the cage and shook it and demanded, "Tell me what you know about Peter Pan," because apparently he was just as much as a crazy badger as everyone always said. 

"Are you kidding me!" Kris demanded, incredulous, hopping to his feet, unsteady but managing. Normally he couldn't see his own glow, but now it was radiating out from him like fire. "I _don't have time for you!_ We don't have anything to do with Peter Pan, none of us do, and the only one who did doesn't anymore! _Why are you so obsessed with him?_ " But showcasing the tragic failing of all Clumsy adults, Hook didn't seem to understand him at all and just slammed Kris down onto a windowsill.

"I don't like you," Kris said petulantly, rattled and giving up and sinking to the bottom of the cage, gathering up the scale once more, feeling hopelessness sink in as Hook chased Mister Smee out of the cabin, shrieking abuse. 

Kris felt the cold wash of horror sweep through him, trapped and alone and so far away from his friends, his home. This was it, wasn't it, he was stuck here in a box and Hook was going to rant at him and even if he got out, Adam was going to be dead in a couple of hours, and Never Land was going to be taken over by pixies, and there was nothing Kris could do about it but watch it all fall to pieces around him. 

His eyes started to sting, and he furiously wiped at them with the heel of his hand; why did everything have to get so complicated? He missed his boring workshop and his boring room and his boring, unchanging life. And he was angry, abruptly, at everything, at the King, at Adam, at the pixies - - mostly at himself; what kind of tinker was he to make such a mess of this? At least Hook had left him with a scenic view, he thought snidely, scraping his fingers through his travel messy hair and watching the ocean slowly turn purple, a sliver of sunlight on the horizon, and he was so intent on watching his life fall apart that he didn't even notice there was a problem until something exploded somewhere on the ship. He startled upright.

It was silent. Kris sat there, ears straining. Then the sounds of shouting and pirates running thundered through the cabin door. At one point he thought he heard a clock ticking, and by the time the window exploded inward he was half expecting the crocodile, having learned to breech and taking that skill the extra step into home invasion. 

"Adam!" he yelled, despair evaporating into joy, because, miraculously, it was him, riding next to Tinker Bell on the shoulder of a Clumsy mostly-child, draped in green wearing a hat with a red feather, cackling as echoes of Hook's shrieking echoed down from the deck above. 

"Found him!" Peter Pan crowed, swooping in and snatching up Kris' cage, excited as he always was, having pulled something or another over on Hook. He flipped the lantern upside down once, twice, and then held it close to his face while Kris fought to keep his balance, dizzy. "What are you doing in there? Taking a nap?"

"I got the scale!" Kris shouted, ignoring him and looking at Adam. "Hurry we don't have much time!"

Peter Pan fiddled with the lock for a minute and then, apparently reaching the end of his patience, ripped the bronze filigree top right off. Kris flew out, scale in hand and landed on Peter's shoulder, where Adam and Tink immediately latched onto him and held on tight while Peter whooped and flew out. 

"How did you do this?" Kris shouted over the roar of the wind; Peter Pan was much faster than a normal fairy. 

"Peter will do anything to annoy Hook," Tink said, in the weary tone of a fairy fighting a familiar battle, but she was smiling faintly, a little sad. She used to have so many adventures with Peter Pan and his Lost Boys. He didn't know what happened, no one did, not really, but she didn't spend time with him anymore. He'd heard rumours of a thing called The Wendy having something to do with it, but that was mostly hearsay. 

Adam snapped him out of his contemplation with a sharp punch to the shoulder. "Ow!" Kris shouted, "Why does everyone keep doing that?"

"Because you keep being stupid!" Adam shouted back. "Why didn't you wait for me?!"

"I couldn't find you! I panicked!"

"That's not an excuse! I was worried!" 

"I'm sorry!" Kris yelled. "I won't do it again!"

"You're a liar!" Adam said, but he was smiling. Kris scowled. "But that's okay, I've accepted that!"

"Generous of you!" 

"Why are we shouting?" Tink shouted. 

"I don't know!" Kris shouted back. "I'm just going with it!"

"Peter, fly out to Skull Rock!" Adam said. "Tink tell him to fly out to Skull Rock. We have to get away from here." Tink nodded and tugged on Peter's ear, pointing them in the right direction. Peter shrugged and flew. 

"How did you know?" Kris said into Adam's ear, balancing the scale between them. Adam shrugged and said, "I figured they'd want to collect in person, and it's the only place away from Never Land that's close enough for us to get to and not be on land. Also it's pretty symbolic."

"That's true," Kris admitted, because it was. The sky was burning orange by the time they got to Skull Rock, and Kris was fairly vibrating with the energy of victory. Adam helped him with the scale, and Peter and Tink settled down on the brow to catch up, or settled down for Tink to listen while Peter expounded on his recent adventures, Kris couldn't really tell the difference. He had a very large personality, Kris thought. Kris and Adam sat down on the cap of the skull and waited. 

And waited. 

_Something's wrong_ , Kris thought, "Where are they?" Adam said nothing. Had the pixies forgotten? Had this been all a trick? This was the third dawn. They had the scale. This was the end of the deal. Kris turned to the horizon, watched as the sun crested, a burning disk of light. There were still no pixies. 

"They can't be on Never Land can they?" Kris wondered, taking off, like he might be able to catch sight of them if he flew higher. Panic was starting to set in, and Kris was so tired he thought he might choke on it, caught between the kind of high strung tension he only ever saw from Brad, and the shaking, blurry eyed exhaustion of the deeply bone weary. The sun crept higher with every minute. 

"Kris - -"

"It doesn't make sense," he said. "They can't be on land, we had a deal, _where are they?_ "

"Kris!" Adam shouted, and Kris turned back, and he'll think about that moment for months, how he couldn't quite see, half blinded by dawn, how he was just a little irritated, convinced they'd been tricked, terrified and tired and spread thin from a journey they hadn't been quite ready for and flown through blind anyway. He'll think about that, and be horrified with himself, because when he finally reached Adam's side, he almost fell out of the sky. 

"No," Kris shook his head, falling that last bit to the ground, legs and wings gone numb. "No, no, no."

"Kris," Adam said, holding up his hands toward him, supplicating and helpless and horrified, because they weren't all there, were they, they were translucent, they were fading away, and Kris was falling back, away from it; they had a deal, they won, this couldn't be happening. 

"We had a deal," Kris said, shaking his head, because he didn't accept this, he couldn't. This was stupid and wrong and against the rules. "I don't - - I don't get it. They can't - - This isn't how it's supposed to go, we're supposed to, to, fix this, and go home, we're supposed to - - " Kris' heel caught on a rock and he fell to the ground, and Adam - wingless, fading Adam - stumbled after him, kneeling down between to Kris' sprawled legs. His hands were shaking, a deep tremble creeping up his arms. There was a horrible look on his face. "We won," Kris said, voice a thick rasp; everything was going blurry. "We made it."

Adam didn't look like he was seeing anything, thousand wing beat stare. The transparency of his arms was spreading, matched with the rising tide of sunlight creeping along the curve of Skull Rock. Tink was looking on with horror, Peter with confusion, and Kris, feeling numb, reached out, slipping his hands over the curves of Adam's shoulders, across the broad plane of his wingless back. He hung on tight, and pressed his forehead into Adam's collar, and didn't even think about it when Adam reached up and cupped Kris' face between his hands, getting more see-through with every second but still solid, if just barely. 

When Adam pressed his lips to Kris', it wasn't even a surprise - - well, no, it was, completely out of nowhere, but it was better for it, soft and warm and Kris gasped before he could help himself, and it got even better when Adam touched Kris' bottom lip with his tongue, sliding his hands into Kris' hair, sending a little shiver down his spine. He fisted his hands in Adam's shirt and held on, desperate, and felt like he was going to fly to pieces.

  


[ ](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/va_bites/26230525/12450/original.jpg)

  


"So that's what those Clumsies were doing," he murmured when they broke apart. Adam was blushing, and his glow was a light pink, but the look on his face was so sad it broke Kris' heart. Kris' eyes were damp, and it was just so unfair that they figured this out now, when they had no more time left. Why hadn't he ever heard of this before?

"They called it kissing," Adam agreed, and the colour of his cheeks was fading, "Figured I'd try it before - -" and between one breath and the next Adam was gone, leaving Kris to stare at his hands, his empty, empty hands. In the background, Tink was crying. Kris reeled. He couldn't seem to find his balance. He felt like all his muscles had been cut, and he was so disoriented it hurt. 

"We had a deal!" Kris screamed up at the sky at last, which was a piercing yellow. He leapt to his feet. He couldn't see anything, everything washed out and liquid, no edges and smeared colours and most of all, no Adam. And before he could collapse into the despair like he so wanted, Tink let out a tiny shriek. 

"We are aware," someone said behind him, and Kris didn't scream himself, but it was a close thing. He whirled around, and there was the pixie, looking irritated, and there was Adam, looking confused, and winged, and best of all, completely solid. "We find your species alarmingly dramatic."

"Ew, gross," Peter said, staring blatantly at the pixie. "What is it? It’s so ugly. Can I touch it?" The pixie snarled at him, which was scary to the assorted fairies, but mostly just hilarious to Peter Pan. 

"I find you enormously hypocritical," Kris hiccuped, trying to regain his balance. This was ridiculous, he was getting emotional whiplash. He surreptitiously wiped his eyes and took a deep breath, trying and hopefully succeeding at sounding imperious. "What took you so long? You ever hear of a prompt delivery of goods and services?"

"We admit to a certain desire to witness your failure," it said, sounding grumpy. It crossed its long, spindly arms and the resulting image was alarming. "And find ourselves angry of your success. This was not a deal we expected to lose, and to that you have our admiration."

"Okay, well," Kris started, because he wasn't sure how to respond to that, so he jumped right in with, "Were you trying to take over Never Land?" because why not?

The pixie smiled with all its pointy teeth and said nothing, which was answer enough, if you asked Kris, so he said, "There's your scale, you can leave now," because he didn't see the point in talking and he wanted it gone from here as fast as possible. 

"We hope this is not the last we see of each other," it said, picking up the scale from where Kris had dropped it. 

"Well that’s a matter of opinion," Adam said, and Kris couldn't agree more, and without anymore fanfare, the pixie disappeared. They were all left in stunned silence. 

Finally Adam said, sounding like he'd been slapped across the face, "Was that really anti-climactic for anyone else or is it just me?" but the tail end of it was smothered by Kris and Tink leaping on him, hugging him so hard he squeaked, and then there wasn't really anything else to say, was there. They'd won. 

\---

The immediate aftermath of the whole situation involved a mostly empty threat of house arrest, and an actual backbreaking amount of backlog at Tinker's Nook. The first time Kris flew into his workshop was almost a nightmare; there were so many things to fix. Kris took to it with relish, and Adam took to Allison's newfound, clinging paranoia with aplomb.

The semi-permanent results of their flight to the mainland and battle with the pixies and subsequent deal with Kyto and the almost death of Adam, was mostly just a lot of stories being told and songs being sang and Katy being super unimpressed with all of them, and making them eat experimental desserts as punishment for making her worry. Brad got his talent back, and it turned out that a number of the older fairies and the ministers knew what kissing was and had decided not to share that information with the rest of them, which Kris would have been super bitter about had he not been spending a ridiculous amount of time doing just that. 

(" _That's_ what a kiss is?" Tink demanded at one point, sounding infuriated. Tales of The Wendy started circulating again.)

"What are you working on?" Adam said from abruptly out of nowhere. Kris put his hammer down on the table, because he might just throw it if he kept it in his hands. 

"Why do you keep doing that?" Kris asked, in the defeated tones of a long fought argument.

"It's hilarious," Adam said. "What are you working on? Looks important."

Kris, who had been trying to save this for the anniversary of Adam's Arrival, sighed and held out what he'd been working on. "It's a necklace. I made it out of a copper block. The filigree beads are Never Silver." He tried not to sound too smug. 

"Where did you get that?" Adam asked, sounding amused. Kris shook his head, but he was grinning. 

"You don't want to know."

"Who's it for?" Adam asked, but he was grinning too, just a secret thing for the two of them. 

"Guess," Kris whispered, holding it out. Adam ducked his head and let Kris put it on him, over his old one with the blue and green sea-glass beads. When the clasp was done up, Adam kissed him, and they spent a while doing that. 

\---

In the end though, the important part was that Never Land was safe, Adam was alive, and Kris had his work and his friends and his home. He didn't think he could ask for much more.


End file.
